My mama’s brow wrinkled up. “What in the hell are you talking about?” She swirled her cigarette hand beside her head. “Has grief made you loony, or what?”

The man on the couch lowered his arm, squinted at me through bleary eyes. “Who the hell are you?” he said. “What’s going on?”

“Shut up,” I said without looking at him, kept my eyes glued on my mama. “In my house the other day, in my kitchen. You said you knew about Zach and me because he and Junie have the same walk.”

My mama stubbed her cigarette out on the countertop, flicked it into the sink. “Yeah, so?”

“How’d you know? How do you know Junie’s walk well enough to recognize it in Zach? And don’t give me some bullshit about seeing her from a distance. You’ve never been that close to her, not for long enough to matter.” I wanted those words to be the truth, needed them to be, but I already suspected they weren’t, long before my mama opened her mouth and confirmed it.

“You got some nerve, coming into my home, accusing me.” She paused, took a swig from her beer. “What exactly is it you’re accusing me of, anyway? Knowing how your daughter walked?” Her voice turned high and full of fake panic. “Quick, someone call the cops. I should be arrested. I’m a goddamn menace to society.”

That’s how you always knew my mama felt cornered, backed against the wall by her own lies. She came out swinging, wild and mean, and she didn’t care who she took down in her wake.

I sank down into one of the wobbly chairs clustered around the scarred kitchen table, leaned forward until my forehead almost touched my knees. “You knew her,” I said, more to myself than to my mama. “You knew Junie.” It was my worst nightmare come true. Everything I’d tried to protect her from, insulate her against, walking right up and making itself at home.

“I was her grandma.”

I shot upward so fast tiny stars sparked in my vision. “I was her mother. And I told you no. I told you to stay the fuck away from her!” I slammed one hand down onto the table, wondered how bad a price I might have to pay for the startled jump it caused my mama. “Isn’t that what you always said when we were growing up, to anyone who tried to interfere, stick their noses in our business trying to help Cal and me? That you were our mama and you made the rules?”

She stared at me, even and calm now. “I did say that.”

“I always knew you were poison. And I’d made my peace with that, with the part of me that comes from you. But you weren’t supposed to touch her, none of your filth or your meanness or your awful decisions were ever going to get close to Junie.” I paused, a horrible thought bubbling to the surface. “Are you the one who introduced Izzy to Matt? Is that how she met him?”