“Your father loved you,” Candace says, and it must pain her to say this.

“Yes, he did. He was a kind and gentle man. Everyone in the village liked him. He was good to my brothers and my mam, and he wasn’t bitter or resentful that he’d wanted to be a teacher and was instead a roofer. And he might have liked me best, being the youngest and the only girl.” I laugh lightly and Candace smiles.

“It must have been difficult, then, to leave your parents when you came to America,” she says.

I hesitate for a moment. I will be heading into dangerous waters if this conversation continues in this direction. “My father died when I was sixteen,” I answer a second later. “He fell from a roof and struck his head. He never woke up afterward and died a few days later.”

“That’s so sad.”

I nod and say nothing. Emotion as thick as taffy is wedged in my throat. I swallow against it.

“Your brothers were there to help you and your mother?” Candace asks.

“The older ones were married and on their own already. My brother Mason, who was nineteen, had already been set to come to America, and my mam told him not to stay back when he’d worked so hard to save to go. So then it was just Mam and me at the house.”

“And?”

“And it was difficult for us without my father’s income, to be sure. My two older brothers had their own families to provide for and I think their wives resented Mam’s and my need. It was not a good time.”

“But you left, too.”

“I . . . I did. A few years later.”

“You left your mother?”

I feel again the lapping of waters that I will not step into.

“She wanted me to go,” I say, and nothing else.

Candace stares at me for a moment. “Are you close with your mother? Do you miss her?”

The image of Mam crying as she helps me pack my bag, and then pressing into my hand money she can’t afford to give, fills my head; the ache of it fills my heart.

“Yes. I miss her very much.”

“I miss my mother, too. You are lucky you can perhaps see yours again someday. I wish I could see mine. I would tell her how sorry I am.”

I flick a stray tear away, smile at Candace, and say nothing.

“Do you think I will see her when I die? Will I see my mother in heaven?” Candace asks, holding my gaze as if she truly believes I know the answer.

“I can’t imagine God keeping mothers from their children in that beautiful place,” I venture.

She rests her head against the pillowed back of her lounge chair. “Yes. How could it be heaven if you were sad there?”

Kat strolls back to us and hovers between her mother’s bed and my chair. Candace lifts her hand. “Come sit on my bed, Kitty Kat.”