“First step is always the hardest.” April put her feet on the ground, and an empty potato-chip bag flew out of the car. The wind carried it across the yard to hang up in the red rosebush right beside the porch steps. She carefully picked it out of the thorns, wadded it up, and shoved it into the pocket of her faded jeans.

This is me, she thought as she waited for Nessa to unlock the door. Empty, worthless, and trashy.

Stop it! the voice in her head scolded. It’s never too late to start all over. As long as you have breath in your lungs and a brain in your head, you can take the bull by the horns, spit in his eye, and make a new and better life for yourself.

“I hope so,” she muttered.

I was right about you, but you’ve still got time to prove me wrong before you die. It was the first time she’d heard Nanny Lucy’s voice in her head, and it startled her.

A musty, closed-up smell hit April in the face when she walked into the familiar living room. Very little had changed over the past decade. The same brown-and-orange floral sofa sat against the north wall, with a log-cabin quilt hanging behind it on an oak rod. The end tables were new, but the old entertainment unit with the television in the center was still straight ahead, and two wooden rockers flanked the sofa. Nanny Lucy had told her that she had rocked all three of her children and all three of her grandchildren in the burgundy one. She seemed proud of that fact, but April would just as soon that she had never rocked April or been responsible for her raising, either one. The green rocking chair had belonged to their grandfather, who had died six months before April’s mother was born. Nanny Lucy had said that he had died without even knowing that she was expecting a third child.

Nanny Lucy was only a little older than I am right now when her husband died, leaving her pregnant with my mother, and with two teenage boys to finish raising alone. No wonder she was so short-tempered, April thought. But I’ve seen other women who survived similar situations.

Nanny Lucy had either been happy, quilting until dawn and singing hymns, or else having one of her bad days, when it seemed like she begrudged April the very air she breathed. Flynn and Nessa seldom saw her on those horrible days, but when they left, April knew that one or maybe a whole week of them was bound to come around.

Flynn stopped in the middle of the floor and then began opening windows. “I’d forgotten that there’s not an air conditioner in this place. Would it be against the rules if I bought a couple of those small ones and hung them in the windows?”