“I did.” She takes a long drag, rolling her eyes with pleasure, and lets it back out with a groan. “Damn, I forgot how good these are.” She catches me staring. “Don’t look at me that way. It’s been a rough day.”

This is typical her. I find my grandmother dead. I mourn the loss of the only real parent I’ve ever known, and yet her day is hard. Her own mother is gone; does she even care?

“What about the police?” I say, stalling.

“I already spoke with them.”

“But you weren’t here. What could you tell them?”

She inhales sharply through her nose. “Cat, she was old. She was overweight. Her heart had been bad for years. It’s kind of a no-brainer.”

“How do you know that?” I ask suspiciously. “About her heart.” Moony never mentioned a heart condition to me.

“We spoke” was all she would say.

I nod my head and start back toward the house. There is no getting around the fact that Moony is gone, and with her will go the house, and the wood floors, and the refrigerator magnets, and my future. I am underage still, by almost a year. And my legal guardian and only living relative is the woman who gave up on me nearly a decade ago. She has spent the last ten years building a life of some kind somewhere else, a life that does not revolve around me. She is not going to give that up to settle here in Moony’s shadow, drinking sweet tea and playing bingo at the Knights of Columbus hall on Wednesdays.

I step deftly around Deena’s latest offering on our lawn and reach for the front door, deliberately not telling my mom about it.

From behind, I hear her curse. “There’s dog shit on my shoe,” she whines, her cigarette hanging from between her lips as she paws the grass with one sandal like an anxious horse. She may be my parent, and I may have to live with her now, but she stopped being my mom years ago. I pinch the bridge of my nose and try to think of her like a roommate. As I pass Moony’s door, I hold my breath.

III.

THIS IS THE CLOSEST I’VE BEEN TO MY MOTHER IN AT least four years. The last time she came to see me was the Christmas of my thirteenth birthday. I have one of those crappy Christmas birthdays where everyone is all celebrated out. When I was still living with her, she would make an overly big deal out of my birthday to make me feel better. She would call our Christmas tree “the birthday tree” and wrap it in pink paper streamers. And she would pile gifts underneath it in colorful birthday wrapping with only one Christmas present among them.