(Well, sometimes Miriam and Katie helped Mommy with the garden, and sometimes your brothers but mostly what you remember is Mommy and you.)

Spreading out sheets of newspaper on the ground so that you could kneel, as Mommy did. Weeding, pruning. Filling up a bushel basket to be dumped at the edge of the property. Compost. Where in a few inches of desiccated leaves and soil your brothers would one day bury the baseball bat they’d used to kill Hadrian Johnson, they hadn’t taken time to thoroughly clean.

Until your arms ached, your vision blotched in bright sunshine and miniature suns and moons danced wherever you looked.

So busy with the house and kids, Lula couldn’t get to the garden often enough. Hopeful in the early summer, planting seeds in methodical rows, putting in plants from the nursery, then in a few weeks weeds were choking everything, couldn’t keep the soil tilled, watered. Weeds, slugs. Japanese beetles. Every God-damned summer of her life, same thing.

She wept. She cursed. Seven kids!—and the husband.

Later, the grandfather would come to live with them. Complaining, leering at her legs in shorts that should’ve been slacks, the old sod had a foul mouth and such a bastard, almost you had to laugh.

She’d laughed, mostly. Until she hadn’t.

Early-morning Mom might sight a groundhog in the garden, a fat furry creature, surprisingly fast on its feet, scrambling to escape as she ran at him flailing her hands and screaming—Get away! God damn you!

Cries of hurt, rage, incredulity as she discovered what the groundhog had devoured that morning.

The little girl was distressed to see her mother so upset. Mommy in her garden appalled at the damage, tears streaming down her cheeks. Ravaged stalks of zinnias in bright happy colors—now just a few fallen petals on the ground. Ravaged tomato plants, just beginning to form green tomatoes round and hard as marbles. Some plants so ravaged and broken, you could not identify them.

Mommy uttering words she could not (could she?) have meant—

Can’t have anything! Not anything! Every God-damned thing I want is taken from me.

The little girl knew to stand aside, at such times. To avoid Mommy’s swerving glaring eye seizing upon her.

And you! All of you! God damn you . . .

Truly, the little girl would not remember such outbursts. Angry shining tears on Mommy’s face, she would not remember. Years in exile seeing her own angry shining face in unexpected mirrors, sometimes in the very presence of strangers who did not and would never know her, even her name.

Staring in a kind of exaltation. And you. All of you. God damn.

OK, MOM. LET ME HANDLE IT.

He’d laughed, it was something of a joke. Killing the groundhog appealed to Jerr, you could see.