Her words then came from far off—from the past to the present—words about Mother and her love. “They first met at the very end of summer in 1960. Your mother immediately figured out how to come back the following summer by getting a job at our club pool as a lifeguard. They didn’t know each other well until that summer of ’61, when the world turned inside out. You can’t really know. I understand that you can read about it and watch movies and listen to the historians, but you can’t really know because you weren’t there.”

“What do you mean?”

“The civil rights movement. Here. In Alabama. The world was on fire, or about to be. Nothing was real and everything was too real. We were caught up in it—your mother and I—in a way that is still hard for me to understand.”

“Mother wrote about a sit-in and the Montgomery Freedom Riders’ riot, but not in detail.”

“Oh, we wanted to change the world. We wanted to make everyone see the error of their ways. That summer, we became involved with a group here in Bayside, and when you’re doing something like that, you’re so on fire, filled with such purpose and righteousness, that everything is heightened—desire, hate, joy, sadness—it’s as if each emotion stretches itself out inside you. Want becomes more than want. Hate becomes more than hate. And she fell in love during this time. With him.” Birdie looked away but continued talking. “He was beautiful.” She shook her head. “He is beautiful.”

“Ms. Birdie, is he alive?”

“Oh,” she said, and smiled at me. “Most definitely alive. But that isn’t what we’re talking about, is it? If you want to know the story, you have to listen to the story, okay?”

“Okay.” Yet I wanted to blurt all my questions.

“We were in our own world that summer. We plotted and talked and schemed and went to speeches. Although we lived in Atlanta, this house has always been my family’s summer home, so we lived here from May to September. Your mother came to live with us. We traveled to Birmingham and Montgomery and told my parents we were going to concerts and movies while we were in bars and honky-tonks.”

“Tell me about one time. Just one.”

“The Freedom Ride.” She shook her head. “That was the most awful one. He had gone to pick up your mother from Georgia Tech and go straight to meet the bus in Montgomery, but they had a flat tire. I was there—in Montgomery—waiting for them. My parents thought we were all going to the beach for the day—May twenty-first. Do you know anything about that ride?”

I shook my head. “I’m embarrassed to say so, but I know very little. I can’t believe Mother never …”