I navigated around the bend in the road, slowing down in deference to potholes big enough to swallow a tire. Small rocks pinged off the undercarriage of my car, and my heart began its slow ascent into my throat. One more curve in the road that was really more of a track at this point, and my mother’s trailer appeared. It was set back slightly from the road, ringed by tall grass and heaps of trash, old tires, and a rusted-out car that has been there for as long as I had memories. I used to hide in the footwell when things inside the trailer got too bad.

I bumped over the uneven ground and parked in the grass, next to a black pickup truck with a dented passenger door. Not my mama’s. My stomach cramped up at the thought she had company. The people my mother invited inside were never people you wanted to meet. But my mama was sitting on the front steps of her trailer alone, a beer can in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She stared at me as I unfolded myself from the car, took a long drag off her cigarette as I approached.

My mama was sixteen when Cal was born. Seventeen when I came along, a year younger than I’d been when I brought Junie into the world. She’d almost died from a bad infection after my birth and there were no more kids after me, a fact she always brought up when she was drunk and angry. As if not being able to have more kids she couldn’t afford and didn’t want to take care of was the great tragedy of her life. She was forty-seven now, but looked sixty. Lank dishwater hair, summer-sky eyes, skinny arms and legs framing a loose pouch of belly and saggy breasts. Rumor was she’d been pretty once, maybe even beautiful. Her face the wellspring of Cal’s own good looks. Had men panting around behind her until they figured out her wild streak wasn’t the sassy-comeback type of attitude they saw in the movies. Mama’s wild streak could tear you limb from limb. Even now, with skin dull and pockmarked from too much alcohol and too many drugs, her eyes were sharp. Watchful. She was a woman you underestimated at your own peril.

“Hey, Mama,” I said.

She took another drag off her cigarette, blew the smoke in my direction.

“Hey, yourself.”

I waited for her to say something about Junie, some acknowledgment of what had happened, and realized she was waiting for the same thing. “Cal called you,” I said, more a statement than a question.

“Yep,” she replied, and after another drag from her cigarette, “Sorry about it.”

I sucked in a breath, looked away. The rear of the trailer had a big uneven gash in the siding. My mama had stuffed the tear with plastic bags and newspaper, but it probably did next to nothing to keep the cold out. I hadn’t been inside the trailer in years, but could still picture every inch of it. Could probably navigate it blind, if I had to. Dark and dank, ratty brown carpet, food-encrusted dishes piled in the sink, faint smell of urine from the busted pipe in the bathroom. And always some man who’d be gone in a few months. Not that we ever wanted them to stick around any longer. As daddy candidates, they’d all left something to be desired.