She’s right. Daddy would have whipped Keith into campaign shape by now and had him on someone else’s ballot years ago with his own run as the end game. I should have seen that. Should have done that. Kayla runs our family foundation, but I inherited Daddy’s strategic mind. Who will I have to pass it on to?

“Um, Mama,” I venture, poking the remnants of my cantaloupe with a fork. “Can I ask you something?”

Mama nods, not looking up from her newspaper that is still delivered to our front door every morning. It’s been so long since I saw the news in ink on paper, it feels like she’s holding an artifact.

“Do you know if we have a history, on either side, of early menopause?”

Mama’s brows bend and dip. She shakes her head. “Not that I know of. Why do you…” She drops her paper to the table and her wide eyes snap to mine. “The doctor. Is that why you were seeing the doctor that day?”

Way to connect the dots.

“I’m in perimenopause, yeah.”

“But you…you’re not even forty.” Mama slams a hand on the table. “Pesticides.”

“Um...huh?”

“It’s those pesticides and those GMAs and—”

“I think you mean GMOs.”

“Yes.” Mama points her fork at me. “Them. And steroids. All in our food, in our water.”

“You’re not wrong, but are you sure there’s no family history?”

“No one I remember. Girl, my mother still had pads under the sink at sixty.”

Between a grandmother still menstruating into her twilight years and a sister who has birthed five children from her actual body, I’m feeling reproductively inadequate to say the least.

“So what does this mean for children?” Mama asks, frowning. “You can still have them, right? You’re so young.”

“I haven’t had a period in four months. Without one of those, no kids. So I’m working with a homeopath to at least get that back, and then I can decide.”

“Decide? Well, how much time do you have to decide?”

“Year and a half. Maybe two.” My shrug is more careless than I am. “I can’t just reproduce on demand. If and when I can get my period on track, I need someone to reproduce with, and I have no prospects. And I’m not sure I want to drop everything to have kids right now. If this window closes and I want kids later, lots of babies are up for adoption and need homes. I don’t need a sperm donor for that.”

“I know you’ve never felt pressure to have kids,” Mama says. “Or to get married, for that matter, but I think you’d make a wonderful mother, if it means anything to you.”

“That does mean something, and thank you, Mama.”

“You keep doing what the doctor says and we’ll get through this.”