MY MOM WAS WAITING FOR ME ON THE FRONT PORCH WHEN I pulled into the driveway. She looked so beautiful, had let her hair go entirely silver and kept it short. She was wearing a camouflage Adidas tracksuit and the craziest sneakers, tropical snakeskin high-tops that I knew probably cost more than two hundred dollars. After all the kids moved out of the house, my mom ended up getting a really lucrative job with the Tennessee Department of Transportation, and she also got into collecting sneakers, which she could never really explain to me. “They look nice, don’t you think?” she’d say, holding up a pair of men’s Nike Terminators in a size too large for her to ever be able to wear them that she’d bought on eBay. She said people in town always commented on her sneakers, especially teenagers, and that made her feel good about herself.

She waved to me, and I waved back. I’d told her that I needed to visit for a few days, to talk to her about an article that someone was writing about me, and that they might need to talk to her as well. “Ooh, okay, exciting, I guess,” she’d said, though she wasn’t sure why I had to come back to Coalfield to do it. But she let me come. And here I was.

It wasn’t like I never came home. We visited my mom at least six times a year, and she came to see Junie in Kentucky when she had free time. Hobart had died of a heart attack when I was in my late twenties, and they had really loved each other, I think, or at the very least, she had loved him more than she’d loved my dad. She had recently been dating a new guy, Hank, a former college soccer coach, who was very kind to my mother and clearly loved her, but they didn’t live together. Every time I saw Hank, he had a bag of my books that he wanted me to sign for gifts to various family members and friends, which made me like him quite a bit.

“Come on in, sweetie,” she said. “I’ve got coffee or sweet tea. I’ve got, like, thirty different kinds of Little Debbies.”

“I’m good,” I said, and we walked into the living room and sat down.

“Tell me what’s going on,” she said. “It sounded important. You never come here by yourself anymore.”