I was afraid to face Sunny. My mother and I had both treated her very poorly. The first year we’d been with the Haltoms, we drove across town on Christmas Eve—we gave her a poinsettia and a Wal-Mart gift card; Sunny gave my mother a pair of fuzzy pink bedroom slippers and me a cartridge for the Game Boy I no longer used. We left before she’d had a chance to serve us the pecan pie she’d baked.

“I better go by myself,” I said.

“Fine by me,” Jamie said.

That Jamie had no desire to meet the woman who had helped raise me, and that I was even less inclined to introduce him to her, said a lot about both of us, I think.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hey, baby,” my mother said.

I could see that both of them had been crying.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“It’s Louella,” my mother said.

“Who?” I asked.

“Terrence’s grandmother,” my mother said.

“Is she sick?” I asked.

“She’s gone,” Sunny said.

“Gone where?”

“To heaven, honey,” she said.

The funeral was held that Saturday, in the Lighthouse Church in East Nashville. The room was full. My mother and I sat with Sunny near the back. We almost hadn’t come. My mother had to supervise the caterers at Mrs. Haltom’s annual party in the Haltoms’ box at the Tennessee Breeders’ Cup. Jamie and I had planned to go down into the infield and cruise the fraternity tailgates, where we would find Arch and the older boys who had recently graduated from Yeatman. But we still had a shred of decency left. Mrs. Haltom had reluctantly agreed to let my mother attend as long as she headed straight to the race park afterward.

“Not a minute after twelve,” Mrs. Haltom had said.

My mother had never been to a black church before. I’d gone a few times with Terrence and Louella years before, but I’d forgotten how much longer and more passionate the services were—even the funerals. We weren’t the only white people in the room; there were three elderly couples I spotted, one of them with their adult children, whom I presumed to be Louella’s former employers. They looked as out of place as I felt. I wondered if they, too, would be hastening off to the horse races as soon as they could get out of the church. Only Sunny seemed at ease. She’d been helping Terrence bring Louella to church since we were boys, and was almost a member of the congregation, though she’d kept her membership in the Church of the Nazarene out in Inglewood.