Daddy’s been transferred to his wheelchair, and he’s fallen asleep with his earbuds in, listening to some sweet George Jones tunes. And Mom is basting the pork shoulder and apparently shelling the butter beans all by her lonesome. I can guess what else is for dinner: Mom is the only person I’ve ever known who manages to make Rice-A-Roni from scratch.

“So good that it tastes just as fine as the packaged stuff,” she always says. Mom’s Rice-A-Roni is deadly rich, with one or two sticks of margarine, and butter beans swimming in more margarine. To top it off, she’ll crack open one of her homemade jars of cranberry sauce with pecans.

I jump up quickly from the bed. That sense of teenage déjà vu drifts in and out of my senses: I’m me at fourteen with a basketball game tonight. I’m me right now, and I spot Willie’s Star Wars backpack on the “guest bed.” I’m fourteen, and in a second, I’m a grown-up. And in a minute, I’m standing over a colander with my mom, shelling butter beans.

“I saw that big shiny red Mercedes parked smack across the street, Mom,” I say as I begin squeezing beans from their casings. “It’s so big that it takes up almost two parking spaces.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I see it there sometimes.” Her voice has a forced sort of nonchalance. But she knows where I’m heading with my question about the fancy Mercedes SUV.

“Balboa Littlefield’s car, right? Balboa’s always had a red car,” I say. “A fancy red car. When I was in high school, Balboa had a red Pontiac Firebird, then a Thunderbird. He must have run out of different kinds of birds, ’cause this one is a Mercedes. A red Mercedes.”

Mom doesn’t answer. She pretends to be distracted by the arrival in the kitchen of The Duke, who must have grown tired watching Willie and Cabot play Call of Duty.

“How about a nice fresh butter bean, Mr. The Duke?” Mom asks as she tosses one into the dog’s mouth. The Duke suddenly has an odd expression on his face. Then he spits it quickly onto the floor.

Mom says to The Duke the same thing she used to say to me and Cabot when we were children: “You just don’t know what tastes good.”

The Duke, disappointed, curls up at our feet and closes his eyes. I return to the conversation that Big Lucy thought she’d escaped.

“We were talking about the red Mercedes, Mom,” I say.

“Were we?” she asks. Suddenly she’s quiet and very innocent, two things she never has been.