The buzz of all the busybodies in the room evaporates when we parade through the door and into the midst of Mama’s mourners. Peggy steers Char and the baby toward the scant offerings left on the food table, then goes with Aunt Audrey to shake some old church lady hands. Uncle Gordie goes to the kitchen, rummaging for something to chase the pint of rum he has stashed in his funeral suit pocket. I make a beeline for Allie, who is standing by the tea, her arms outstretched and beckoning, her entire frame shrouded in a shaky teal haze. I lean into her hug and try to laugh as I whisper, “Fuck, would Mama ever hate this. Look at all these old bags, coming all the way out here like they give a shit.”

She ignores my glib chatter. She squeezes me tight. She gasps in my ear, “Now we both have to learn how to be motherless.”

I slip out of Allie’s arms and bolt to the bathroom, where I crank the water on full blast in the sink so that I can heave and gag over the toilet bowl for a few minutes in relative secrecy. When I come out, Uncle Mossy is standing there, grinning from ear to over-sized ear. He takes a couple of quick shuffles toward me, squints his eyes, screws up the bottom half of his rubbery face, and cranes his stubby little neck until his face is just a few inches from mine.

“I sees it,” he whispers, “dat little rainbow.”

“G’wan, Mossy, stop hovering outside the ladies’ room before somebody thinks you’re some kind of pervert.” Peggy elbows her brother over toward the dartboards in the corner. “Go smile and nod at Flossie Baker for a bit.”

“You look like ten tons of garbage,” she says as she turns to me. “Are you okay?”

“Fine.”

She leans in so that for a second I think she’s going to hug me, and I instinctively start to recoil. Instead, she takes a long, slow suck of the air in the space between my ear and my shoulder.

“Hmm.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” She begins to rotate her girth back to the busyness of the room. Then she stops. “You know what petrichor is?”

I give her a faint frown and a head wobble that barely indicates no. I hate admitting that I don’t know what a word means. Especially to the likes of Peggy.

“It’s the smell after it rains. That fresh, earthy, growing smell. Right fertile smelling.” Peggy’s voice is philosophical and dreamy, but then it shifts abruptly, sharp and pointed as she looks me in the eyes. “Weird to catch a whiff of that in the dead of February.”

With that, she waddles off. My head spins, my eyes are bombarded by a slew of reddish-orange and dusty blue twinkles, and my gut tightens around an impossible, paranoid notion: Peggy knows.

Allie slides up beside me with a woman I don’t recognize. Long coal black hair with a pale silver streak, nonchalantly looped into a knot. Intricately detailed birchbark earrings, a turquoise scarf, probably woven by a pack of goddess-blessed babies on the banks of a sacred Guatemalan river.