“I can’t promise you that we won’t just run,” she said to me.

“Run?” I said. The baby made a gurgling sound, and I jostled her in my arms. “What about me?” I asked her.

“You’re his,” she said. “She’s mine. That’s just the way it goes sometimes.”

“What if I don’t want to be his?” I asked.

“You don’t have to be,” my mother said. “You just have to be you.” She closed her eyes and swayed on her feet. She’d stay the next week in her bed with the baby, sweaty and under with fever and so much blood, the baby just nestled into her, drinking when she wanted.

“I have to protect her,” my mother said. “At all costs.”

After, she never left my mother’s side. She lived her life on my mother’s hip, or in my mother’s lap, and she was a big, fat sass of a baby with a wicked laugh and hair like copper springs.

I loved her.

But every day, my mother and I seemed to just check on each other, to see if the other was still there. I left school and I started working, and I’d drive my mother’s truck out to Walmart to buy diapers with cash. Where no one knew to ask me who I needed them for.

Baby Jane never asked me anything. He just let me talk, so much that sometimes I felt like I was unraveling.

I asked him everything. What his real name was. Where he was from. Where he had worked. If he’d been married.

“That is my real name,” he said. I didn’t believe him.

He was from Georgia.

He worked on cars.

He’d never been married.

I went to the car that first time, then waited a few days to go back. And then the days got closer together until I met him almost every day. I knew it was weird. But some days, having somewhere else to be between work and home felt like a balm.

I told him all the books I’d read and loved and why. I liked the sound of his voice. It was deep and reedy, and there was something old-fashioned about the way he said certain words. I couldn’t tell if he had an accent. I liked the smell of his clothes, his cigarettes, the way his hands moved and his mouth when he talked. He was smart like no one else I’d ever known, and something underneath the surface said to me that he was deeply broken, in ways I couldn’t imagine.

He told me he’d retired early. If I saw him in town, he’d nod in recognition, but he never stopped to talk to me.

Summer is a brief hot second up north. After Labor Day, the nights got cold. Not long after, the grass was dusted with frost in the morning.

My mother let me drive her truck only if it was raining. Otherwise, I took my bike. She didn’t want to be detectable at all, and having the truck parked at the diner was predictable and traceable. I’d throw a flannel shirt on over my work shirt, ride my bike down Mill Street to the shortcut, and duck in, my wheels hitting the trail with a puff of dirt.