“Oh,” my mom said, “okay, then.” She was smiling like, what did it really matter? She’d already seen us making out. She knew something was going on. “Boys!” she shouted to my brothers, which made Zeke flinch. And they rambled into the room. I don’t think they had realized that Zeke was in the house yet. It wasn’t until we were all seated, eating our pizza, and my mom asked Zeke a question that my brothers all looked up in wonder at this strange name, this strange boy in our house. Then they went back to wolfing down pizza.

“So,” my mom asked Zeke. “What brings you to Coalfield?”

“Well,” Zeke began, looking at me as if we’d rehearsed an answer earlier today, “we’re here just, like, visiting my grandmother. My mom grew up in Coalfield.”

“Oh, really?” my mom replied, getting somewhere. “What’s her name?”

“Cydney,” Zeke replied. “Cydney Hudson when she lived in Coalfield.”

“Oh!” my mom shouted, her eyes so big. “I know Cydney! She was a few years behind me in school. She was, what’s the word, like some kind of kid genius.”

“A prodigy?” Zeke offered.

“Exactly. A musical prodigy.”

“That’s right,” Zeke said. “Or, I mean, that’s what my mom tells me.” He turned to me and just said, “Violin.”

“She got this fancy scholarship to Juilliard, I remember,” my mom continued. “I haven’t seen her since.”

“That’s her,” Zeke replied.

“Is she famous?” my mom asked him, seeming a little starstruck. “I mean, in classical music circles?”

“No,” Zeke said. “I don’t think so.”

“Oh,” my mom said, looking so disappointed. “It was such a big deal when she got that scholarship. I remember the paper wrote a big article about it. And she was a prodigy. I haven’t thought of her a lot, but when I did, I figured she was in New York, playing concerts for, like, the prime minister of Japan or something.”

“Well, no,” Zeke said, taking his mother’s artistic failures very well, I have to say. “My mom said everyone at Juilliard was a prodigy. She got a job at the Memphis Symphony Orchestra and then she met my dad and they got married and, I guess, I mean, you know, she had me.”

“Well . . . that’s great,” my mom said. “Tell her that Carrie Neal says hello.”

“Are you guys boyfriend and girlfriend?” Andrew interrupted, pointing the tip of his slice of pizza at Zeke in a way that only my brothers could make look threatening.

“No!” I interjected, reaching my hand out ineffectually toward Zeke, like we’d stopped short in the car and I was protecting him.

“No?” my mom asked, looking a little amused. “Is that right?”

“Well,” Zeke said, looking down at his empty plate, “I mean, it’s complicated, right?”