Mavis returned, after a considerable interval of good posture on my part, and handed me four dusty yearbooks from the 1960s. Back then, evidently, students went through eight grades, at least in Cactus Bend, and then made the leap to high school.

I thanked Mavis, took the books and sat down in one of the plastic chairs nearby. Another bell rang, and the shuffle of kids moving through the halls receded to blessed silence.

My hands trembled a little as I opened the cover of the first book, a thin volume with 1963 and the school logo embossed on the cover. I found Evie Larimer, geeky-haired and grinning, with the other freshmen. Her eyes were bright with innocence—she probably hadn’t gotten involved with Geoff’s father yet, or mine. She hadn’t given up her scholarship, and her dreams, whatever they might have been, to work rotating shifts at the Happy Trails Truck Stop. I wished she’d start moving around within the picture, Harry Potter-style, and speak to me. Explain everything.

I could have warned her then. Take another road, Mom. Write yourself another script, because this one ends badly.

A tear plopped on the page before I realized I was crying.

I wiped it away with the tip of an index finger and studied the faces of the other students. No one looked familiar, and I didn’t recognize any of the names beneath the photos.

When I turned to the sophomore class, though, my gaze went straight to one particular shot. Rod Waters. Class president. Captain of the football team.

His resemblance to Geoff was beyond uncanny.

Here he was, then. Nemesis #1. The guy who got my mother pregnant, the bearer of the Bad Seed.

The poached eggs I’d had for breakfast roiled in my stomach.

I closed the book and opened the second in the four-year sequence of my mother’s high school career. All the career she was ever going to have, as it turned out.

I sniffled.

Mom made the honor society as a sophomore. She went to Girl’s State, whatever that was, and made the varsity cheerleading squad. Her hair looked a little better, too. I felt an aching tenderness, flipping through those pages. It was a kind of reverse fortune-telling, like peering into a crystal ball focused on the past instead of the future. Evelyn Larimer didn’t look like the kind of girl who would end up dead of a gunshot wound on the living room floor of a rented double-wide, but, then, what did that kind of girl look like?

I soldiered my way through my mother’s junior and senior years. By the time her graduation picture was taken, the light had gone out of her eyes. She looked resigned. Maybe she was already carrying Geoff. She knew college was down the drain, I could see that in her face.

I wondered if anyone else had seen it.

Like my grandparents.