And of course it isn’t simply the depth of her feeling that actually makes her vomit when she pronounces the word “abortion.” I haven’t learned to recognize what’s going on, though I will soon. I haven’t thought about how most trips to the grocery—where she’s befriended the owner of the store, an Arab American who greets her lavishly, the mornings she drives the three blocks to the Star Market—yield a bottle of vodka along with the Whip ’n Chill and Rice-A-Roni, the cheap cuts of beef to be tenderized and braised all afternoon to produce her Swiss steak. Not every time, not every day. But increasingly her behavior’s taking turns toward the dramatic. She’s “fainted” in the kitchen more than once, and she sweeps around now and then, head in the air or held broodingly low, clearly in the throes of some drama she’s enacting, some old conversation, some play which is taking place silently, though it leads her sometimes to audible weeping.

When she’s composed herself and turned back to me, I ask her how she knows. She says she and my father grew suspicious, because Sally asked them for money, three thousand dollars for a new roof. Why they doubted that, I don’t know. Her marriage had broken apart, her Jerry smitten with a woman he’d met at the evangelical church he’d joined. Saying “Amen” in the choir, my mother tells me, but all the time with his eye wandering. Sally had told them that part, how she’d been on her own for months, struggling to raise her three kids, but they’d hired a private investigator to find out the rest.

A private investigator? My mother’s narrative slips into the realm of the movies, a fevered noir. And as in all such tales, if you go poking into what you don’t need to know you won’t like what you find. How did they think a single woman with just a high school diploma took care of three kids, in 1966, in Memphis, Tennessee?

Many years later I will love the stories Sally will tell me about her high life in those troubled days—or low life, depending on your point of view. And I think she’ll love the stories herself, as people with flamboyant Pasts often come to do. Not that you want to live like that anymore, mind you, but what energy and delight lie in narrating those bad old days! And don’t the tales get richer, more deeply worked over time: the wild highs higher, the scrapes narrower, the past gaining a glamour polished by distance and the wonder of having survived it all?