My mother owned three precious things, a matching jewelry set from her mother’s mother: a necklace of white gold and garlands of pearls and diamonds, and two stud earrings, big fat diamonds clenched in white-gold claws. She kept the set bedded in red silk velvet in a Colonial Girl Sandwich cookie tin in our house in Durham. My mother might have hated the jewelry, which did not keep her fed sufficiently as a child, did not send her to school, did not save her from the desperation that led her to marry my father. But instead she loved it; she pierced my ears when I was ten so I could wear the earrings and necklace together when we went out on glamorous occasions, which meant a stroll through Duke Gardens in the spring, among the college students, dogwoods, and magnolias. She must have asked me if I wanted piercings and I must have said yes, but she never understood that acquiescence is not the same as desire, and by asking for permission she forced my hand.

In January, she had begged me to apply to college. I did, even though I barely had the grades, even though I didn’t want to. It was her dream, never mine, kicked off by her own mother, or her mother’s mother, the long line of women who never got out, but instead grew old and stiff as boards and knocked over one onto the next, leaning hard all the way to me.

In May, she sold the necklace to pay for what the financial aid wouldn’t cover.

In September, she bought me a plane ticket for Richmond. “I always knew you’d manage,” she said, driving me to the airport on the gray slopes of I-40. I could have taken the bus to Richmond but she wanted me to arrive like the best students. I thought I was doing the right thing by accepting her offer. It seemed cruel to say no.

Four days before I met Bay, when we parted at the airport, she spent a while searching for something in her handbag, clearing her throat. Because she was a big-boned, broad-shouldered woman, her handbag, like her floral cap-sleeve dress, looked funny on her, though for once I felt sorrier for her than ashamed for myself. She seemed to find what she’d been looking for. “Take this,” she said. She handed me a little photograph.

It was a picture of my father, yearbook-style. Cloudy gray background, chin up, face to the side, and eyes front. He had a high fade and the calm looks of a man who knew how to shoot.

“So you can remember him,” she said.

I didn’t want it. I hadn’t seen my father since I was six. I didn’t want to remember what he looked like. I tucked his face into my wallet.