She used to always make me sing Patsy Cline at the state fairs, the same ones that have the hot-dog-eating contests. State fairs are the poor person’s beauty pageant. You can sign up to sing at the last minute, and everyone’ll loan you their hairspray and handkerchiefs. It’s heavy on the country music and also, weirdly, on the Disney solos. There were Patsy Clines and Dolly Partons, but also a lot of Queen Elsas and Ariels. Patsy takes me back to hot funnel cakes and face-painting stands and pony rides. There were also BB-gun shots from the target booth and the clanging metal of the Tilt-A-Whirl and the ding! ding! ding! when someone hit the top of the Test Your Strength game, but I don’t like to think of those.

The dryer switches cycles under my legs, and I miss the nights with Mom at the Laundromat. The rumbling and whirring noises were soothing, and it was always warm in the winter. Also, nobody talks to anybody. You come to clean your clothes, not socialize.

Mom would read or do a puzzle from her jumbo sudoku book, and I’d listen to music on our portable CD player and make towers out of the quarters we kept in a ziplock baggie labeled Clean Me Fund. When I was really little, I’d burrow under the still-warm clothes Mom dumped back in the laundry basket. I smelled like lavender fabric softener the rest of the day.

Ginger comes in now and hops up next to me. It takes her a few tries to do it. It’s eight o’clock on Thursday night, but she just got home. Apparently, estate law is a needy business with needy people who keep you on call just to answer questions like, Is the plane privately owned or part of the company’s assets? And if it is part of the company’s assets, Does that mean I shouldn’t have used it to fly my son to his college visit at Princeton? Seriously. That call had Ginger out the door at six this morning.

She hands me a half-opened package of the pink animal crackers and takes a handful for herself.

“Did you get dinner?” she asks, letting her high heels slide off and fall to the floor.

“Yeah. Dan picked up Chinese.”

“Good.”

She closes her eyes and leans back. The vibration of the machine makes her shoulders shake, and she smiles. “You know, your mom and I used to do this too. We’d sit on the dryer and trade Baby-Sitters Club books until your grandma shooed us off.”

“Mom never told me that,” I say, and feel another frizzle of anger. The more I learn about Mom, the less I understand her.