Cady laughed self-consciously. “Some. You should have seen me when I took driver’s ed—it was a month before I could figure out how to keep the car going in a straight line.”

I waited a respectful moment before changing the subject. “Was the protest at the silo connected to the anti-nuke movie?”

“I don’t think so. The protest was a part of the times, you know, people all over the country fed up with the arms race and wanting an end to it. The Day After was more like a reflection, see, of the public mood. My mother, from what I can dig up, she was part of this commune who wanted to try to re-create what the women in England were doing at that same time, protesting nuclear warheads in the middle of the country. At its height the English had almost a hundred thousand women at their air force base. Here in Lawrence they had maybe twenty. Kansas, you know!”

She fiddled with the reader dials, making the text jump in a sea-sickening way. “I’ve read all the local stories—including what the Kansas City and Topeka papers covered—a few dozen times, but I didn’t know who Emerald Ferring was. I mean, that she was a movie star or African-American or anything. I didn’t pay attention to her name all the times I read about the protests. I was just looking for any mention of my mom. Jenny, her name was. Jennifer Perec.”

Cady whispered her name, talking more to herself than to me.

“What does your grandmother say about the commune and the protests?”

“I’ve never been able to get her to talk about it, beyond saying the only good that came out of it was me.” She flushed and glanced up. “That’s nice and all, but it’s always felt to me like Gram is hugely angry with my mom, and I can’t get her to talk about her. Or get any idea of who my father might have been. He wasn’t in the car with my mom, and Gram doesn’t know who he was, or at least she says she doesn’t know.”

I could imagine that deep wound as well: a teenage romance, the boy not wanting to be saddled with a baby when his girlfriend died. He’d had the option to disappear like smoke. “Did she—Jennifer—grow up here? She must have some childhood friends you could talk to.”