“Oh, gosh, I don’t think she had anything to do with it, but I’d have to look at the credits. The Day After, it’s called. It was made for TV and showed the kind of radiation poisoning you could expect after a nuclear war, if you weren’t killed right off, and how there wouldn’t be food, that kind of thing. It was pretty controversial here in town, some people thinking the mayor should be thrown out of office for letting the Russians believe that Lawrence was scared of nuclear weapons. Of course, there was pretty strong support for disarmament here as well, but Reagan—he was president at the time—he tried to get ABC not to show it.

“The movie was released right after I was born, so of course I don’t have personal knowledge about all the controversies, but I talk to everyone who was living here then about what they remember.” She gave an embarrassed laugh. “I’ve watched the movie maybe fifty times. I keep hoping I’ll see my mother.”

“Was she an extra?”

“No. She was at the protest, though, at the missile silo, and then . . . she died.”

She bit her lip, pushing back emotion, tears. I sat quietly, waiting until she felt like speaking again.

“No one knows what happened—I mean, how it happened. She drove her car off the road and drowned in the Wakarusa—that’s a little river near the silo. I was six weeks old, and she’d taken off without me. She’d forgotten me—that’s what hurts the most. One of the farmers found me and brought me to Gram. They say maybe she was smoking dope, which I guess could be true, or drunk—how would I know?”

I’d lost my mother when I was a teenager, and I still missed her. I could imagine the hole there’d be in the middle of my heart if I’d never known her at all.

“I started studying history—it’s what I mostly teach, you know, although there’s general social studies, politics, that kind of thing—and why I work here. I keep hoping I’ll get some whiff of something that will explain my mother to me. Gram, she’s so bitter about everything that went on around Kanwaka, she never talks about it. It wasn’t until I got to high school that I even knew about the protests at the silo—all she ever would say was that my mom died when her car went off the road. First Grandpa—her husband—died in a car crash, then Jenny, my mom. Gram almost wouldn’t let me learn how to drive, she’s so sure there’s some kind of curse. But you can’t really get around in a town this size without a car.”

“That sounds like a tough load for both of you.”