Leni walked past a new structure that was about nine feet high by four feet wide, with sides covered in thick black plastic (unspooled garbage bags, Leni was pretty sure). An open door revealed an interior full of sockeye salmon, sliced in half along the spines and hung tented on branches. Thelma was kneeling in the dirt, tending to a fire built in a contained metal box. Smoke puffed up in dark clouds, reached up to the salmon hanging on branches above the fire.

Mama looked up from the salmon she was gutting at a table in the yard. There was a smear of pink guts across her chin. “It’s a smokehouse,” Mama said, cocking her head toward Thelma. “Thelma is teaching me how to smoke fish. It’s quite an art, apparently—too much heat, you cook the fish. It’s supposed to smoke and dry at the same time. Yum. How was your first day of school?” A red kerchief kept the hair out of her eyes.

“Cool.”

“No social-suicide issues with the clothes or the lunch box? No girls making fun of you?”

Leni couldn’t help smiling. “No girls my age at all. But … there’s a boy…”

That got Mama’s interest. “A boy?”

Leni felt herself blushing. “A friend, Mama. He just happens to be a boy.”

“Uh. Huh.” Mama was trying not to smile as she lit her cigarette. “Is he cute?”

Leni ignored that. “He says there’s a community barbecue tonight, and I want to go.”

“Yeah. We’re going.”

“Really? That’s great!”

“Yeah,” Mama said, smiling. “I told you it would be different here.”

*   *   *

WHEN IT CAME TIME to dress for the barbecue, Leni kind of lost her mind. Honestly, she didn’t know what was wrong with her.

She didn’t have a lot of clothes to choose from, but that didn’t stop her from trying on several different combinations. In the end—mostly because she was exhausted by the desire to look pretty when pretty was impossible—she decided on a pair of plaid polyester bell-bottoms and a ribbed green turtleneck beneath a fringed, fake-suede vest. Try as she might, she couldn’t do anything with her hair. She finger-combed it back from her face and twined it into a fuzzy, fist-sized braid.

She found Mama in the kitchen, placing thick squares of cornbread into a Tupperware container. She had brushed her shoulder-length, shag-cut hair until it glimmered in the light. She had definitely dressed to impress in tight bell-bottom jeans and a fitted white sweater with a huge Indian turquoise squash-blossom necklace that she’d bought a few years ago.

Mama seemed distracted as she burped the lid of air from the container.

“You’re worried, aren’t you?”