“Thanks,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”

“Hey, what’s family for?” I said, draping my jacket around my shoulders.

She turned and looked at me steadily. “You’re not just shitting me, are you? You really mean it.”

“I mean it.” I looked straight back into those blue eyes. “I made a promise almost twenty years ago that you would be part of our family if you ever wanted to be.”

“To your mother?”

I nodded.

“Do you know, I only saw her that one time, but I still remember her as if it was last week. She was the nicest woman I’d ever met.” She finished locking the wagon. “You don’t know what it meant to me when she put that bracelet on my wrist and it was just like yours. I mean, you were her daughter, so sure, you’d have a pretty one. But mine was just as pretty and shiny. And that candy! No chocolates I’ve ever had since tasted as good as what she gave me that day.”

“Till the day she died, she was sorry she didn’t just put you in the car and bring you home with us,” I said. “She went back a week later with Andrew, but you were gone.”

Tally’s face lit up. “Did she really? Because she promised she’d come back to see me, and when my mom came to take me away, I told her I couldn’t go till Mama Sue came—that’s what she told me to call her, okay? Soon as I said that, Mom slapped me and said I’d been played for a fool. That your mother never had any intention of coming back.” She shrugged. “I always wondered.”

“Oh, Tally,” I said helplessly, my eyes misting over.

If Mother had followed her first instinct, Tally would still be Olivia and we would have grown up together like sisters. Life would have been so different for her. No baby at fifteen. College. A settled life instead of gypsying from town to town. Different for me, too, maybe. She would have been there for both of us when Mother was dying. And she was just enough older that she might have kept me between the ditches instead of taking it off road, straight through the underbrush.

We faced each other across that wide, wide river of might-have-beens and she gave me a wry smile.

“If wishes were horses,” I sighed.

“Yeah,” she said. “C’mon. I’ll buy you a beer, okay?”

At her trailer, she pulled a couple of long necks from the refrigerator. “Want a glass?”

I shook my head and we went back outside. Her trailer and Polly’s were at right angles with only a few feet between the back ends. Several lawn chairs were there between the two doors, which were about fifteen feet apart, and a charcoal grill stood off to the side. We could hear the murmur of girlish voices inside the other trailer, and Tally went over, stuck her head inside, and called, “You guys all right?”