“What’s easy for you is hard for us,” Bay said to me, in a singsong. “What’s hard for you is easy for us.” The family members laughed.

I smiled along, though I did not understand.

But I had secret knowledge too. What none of these people knew was that he’d kissed me the night before. Maybe there were no couples here, but he’d kissed me.

Bay took a seat at the far side of the table. I sat, too, and the women on either side smiled. “You must be tired,” said one.

“This is the hardest part,” said the other, so gently that I felt my face flush. “Have a little bread. We make it ourselves.” She said her name was Sara. She was a beautiful woman with a grown-out buzz cut and big eyes with delicately veined eyelids. She buttered a piece of bread for me, but I felt too nervous to eat. I looked around. Laid out on the table were steaming red-clay cups and silver bowls and jam jars, berry branches and fall leaves, basket-embossed loaves of bread.

What would my mother think of me here? I hadn’t yet learned to control my thoughts, so she rose up, unbidden. She still thought I was on my way to college in Richmond.

I was fleeing from: my mother, whom I constantly disappointed. She worked at two different gift shops. She bought our groceries at the discount store that carried unpopular products from major brands—Welch’s jam with chia seeds, double-protein Philadelphia cream cheese, pumpkin spice Cheerios. She liked to speculate about why these things didn’t sell, always trying to reassure me that they were just as good, better, more special than the full-price versions. As a rule, the less confidence she had in what she was saying, the more she repeated herself. She said everything she did was for me, all so I could afford college and a better life. She said that over and over.