“We all make our decisions about what our heart can live with and can live without. She made her decisions, and you can make yours.”

Avoiding all conversation about my own life, I changed the subject. “Tell me more about the things you did that summer when your parents thought you were at the club or swimming pool.”

“Ah—” She laughed into the word. She sat at the table again and patted it as if it were a child. “We didn’t do anything to brag about. Most of our time we thought we were changing the world—and maybe we were, but only in the smallest ways. Remember, this is Alabama and we were smack-dab in the middle of the drama and fire. Martin Luther King Jr. George Wallace. Desegregation. It all seems organized and logical in hindsight—you can learn about it in school in a nice little timeline—but we were in the middle of chaos. We only knew to do what we knew to do—the little things, which we thought were big things.”

“Like?”

“Sitting with our black friends at the lunch counter or walking them into the voter registration at Town Hall or standing with them while they used the public water fountain. The laws had changed, but the people had not.”

“Were you ever in … danger?”

She smiled. “We thought we were. And maybe we were. But this is a small town and everyone knew our mamas and daddies, and no one was gonna touch us. After Montgomery we stayed local.”

“In the end, though—you did make a difference. You did.”

“We’d like to think so.”

“Will you at least give me the names of the group y’all hung out with that summer? I promise I won’t use your name or anything. I just want to see if anything rings a bell or if I recognize a name or—”

“It won’t do you any good.”

“Please.”

“Please don’t ask me again.”

“I don’t understand why his name is such a secret.”

“Well, I don’t understand why you so desperately need to know his name. So, let’s just say we don’t understand one another and let it go at that?” She had this sweet smile on her face.

Birdie cleared our breakfast dishes and placed them in the sink without rinsing before speaking again. “So, what is on your schedule today?” she asked as if we were never talking about Mother, as if the conversation we’d just had was in the distant past and I’d just walked into the room. When Birdie was done, she was done.

“Well, I’m headed to Montgomery with Hutch to look at old film in the archives.”

The sink water splashed and the plates rang against one another like wind chimes as Birdie rinsed and placed them in the dishwasher. She turned and smiled at me. “Your old boyfriend. The boy from Linden?”

“Yes.”