“What do you want?” Zach asked, like he actually thought the answer might be him. It almost made me pity him for being such a child. He still didn’t understand that what this might have been once upon a time made no difference anymore. One-night stand lust, potential true love, lifelong friendship. All the possibilities ceased to matter the moment Junie died.

“I want to wake up tomorrow and have a daughter again. Or I want to wake up the day I met you and call in sick to the diner. Rewrite history.” I shrugged. “I want this pain to go away. Can you make that happen?”

Zach shook his head, his eyes ancient. “No.”

I stepped out onto the porch. “Then grow up, because you don’t have anything I need.”

TWENTY

I’d visited my mama’s trailer more since Junie’s death than I had in the entire time she’d been alive. It scared me how familiar it all felt, how I slipped back into it like I’d never managed to claw my way out. It fed into my horrified suspicion that this was where I was always destined to end up. That my time as my daughter’s mother had been only a momentary blip, a brief respite from my true nature. That what I really was, and always had been, was my mother’s daughter.

The rusted black pickup was still parked in my mama’s yard, but this time I got the dubious pleasure of meeting the man who drove it. Or at least I assumed the guy passed out on my mama’s ripped faux-leather sofa was the owner. One homemade-tattoo-covered arm thrown over his face, a sliver of hairy beer belly winking at me where his T-shirt failed to meet the waistband of his dirty jeans. He was so exactly my mama’s type she might as well have picked him out of a catalog.

He barely stirred when I let myself in, tattered screen door slamming behind me. “Mama?” I called. “You in here?” Too keyed up to be careful, forgetting all the protocols in place to keep things on an even keel. Don’t scream, don’t demand, don’t surprise. My mama was like a rabid dog that way, one mistake in the approach and you were as good as dead.

“Jesus Christ, quiet the fuck down,” my mama hissed from the direction of the kitchen. She came around from behind the fridge, a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “Got half a mind to kick your ass,” she said. “Barging in here like you own the place.”

The thing that had been nagging at me, plucking my mind like a violin string over and over until it about drove me crazy, had come rushing in as I’d left the Logans’ house this morning. The first time I’d let it go in what felt like forever, and suddenly there it was, my mind laying it out in front of me like a hog on a platter, ripe for the taking. I pointed at her, took two steps in her direction. “How did you know what Junie’s walk was like?” I demanded.