“Well, with the tumours and —”

“It’s not the tumours, Crow. It’s like Mossy said. Emotions are colourful thoughts, and you two can see them. All this stuff, it’s in the family.”

“Right. The cursed Fortunes.”

“I beg your pardon,” she says, a sharp indignation in her voice. “You wanna see cursed? Look at the poor Willy Nilly Gilligans. Dozens of them all over the place, not one with an IQ over sixty-five. Or the Bonk-Headed Blacketts from Down the Point, who all look like they got beat with an ugly stick. Even the babies. Or your father’s people, with their cold little hearts full of nothing but want and spite. Now that, Crow, dear, is cursed. The senses, these ways, have been passed down through the ages to people who’ve earned them the hard way. Not a curse. A blessing. If you learn to use ’em right.”

An audible snort of skepticism escapes from my throat.

“Scoff all you want,” Peggy says. “But it’s true. Once you know what’s what, you have a choice. Use it, or lose it. Your aunt Janice? She lost it. Couldn’t make good meaning of what she heard, lost her mind in all the static, and died trying to make it stop. Same with Melly and Cecil. Or Gordie, being an angry drunk, or Audrey and her fanatical Bible thumping. If the stubborn bastards would just pay attention to what’s right in front of them without getting all worked up, we’d all be better off. Now you and Mossy, you can see what people’s minds are made of. Their true colours, and the shape of their lives. And once you got a clear bead on them, and what it all means, you figure out how to use it. For ill, nil, or goodwill. There’s power there.”

“What about you?” I wait for a plume of murky pink hypocritical do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do to puff up from her head.

“I’m doing the best I can with what I’ve got,” she says, hands gripping the steering wheel tighter. “You know how you can’t smell the hum of your own armpits? Well I couldn’t smell my own hurt for the longest time. I used to watch my mother coo and coddle you, and I’d listen to Effie gripe about the trials and tribulations of motherhood, and you know what I’d smell? Warm cinnamon rolls with this hint of some other spice I could never quite place. Made me feel like a little beggar outside the bakery with my face pressed up against the window, drooling at the cozy sweetness just out of my reach. After a while, that smell made me sick. But your mother, she inspired me.”

“What was Mama’s freak show party trick, then?” I choke a little as I say her name out loud.

“You really don’t know, do you?” Peggy says, as a host of incredulous purple curls spring from around her head and tickle the corners of her mouth into a soft smile. “What your mother did for people around here? Her, a first responder. Volunteer firefighter. Visiting the hurt and the sick and the dying at the friggin’ hospital all them years, even though she was already spread thinner than the margarine at Lent. Didn’t you ever notice those hands of hers? Or what she did with them every time you fell down and scraped your knee when you were little?”