Or is it that my parents have decided that she will devote herself to mothering, that she’ll pour herself into the care and cultivation of us, who are her right and proper sphere? My sister’s only two when the war ends; my parents begin their wanderings in the towns of Tennessee. Then there’s that boy, stillborn, little occasion of grief buried in one of those places in the slipstream. When I learn as a child I would have had a brother, an older brother, even then I think how oddly different my life would have been, perhaps unrecognizable. My mother tells the story while she irons, lighting up another Salem. He has a little headstone somewhere, to this day I don’t know where.

And then me, born when she’s thirty-three and my father thirty-nine, delivered with a mass of fibroid tumors that also mean the end of her child-bearing. She’d expected a girl and named me Rachel Ann. What do we call him? Spur of the moment: Mark Alan, for no real reason.

Then years of moving, disconnections, though when we stay someplace a while she begins friendships, makes overtures: Daughters of the Eastern Star, PTA. Then we’re gone again. But that’s better, isn’t it, than the alternative, back to those hardscrabble unpromising farms, back to houses with newspapers on the walls, the one warm room centered on the cookstove, an old iron pot of squirrel simmering with some long-canned okra, green beans slick with fatback?

Maybe that’s what’s depressing about Titusville, the soft-voweled tang of the South, too close to the bad old days. Though it’s just like the way they talk about Puerto Rico: “That was a terrible life,” they say. “Who’d want to go back there?” But in the stories life seems so vivid, so much more real than this one, some substance about it worth remembering.