“Yeah.” I can feel it. The warm dirt. Starting to cry, but knowing I wasn’t supposed to, because Mom told me I was a big girl now, too big to cry. And then Ginger put her hands under my arms and scooped me up. And I screamed louder. Even then I didn’t like other people touching me. But then she handed me a strawberry. She was the one who handed me the strawberry, not Mom.

“Ginger, how come that’s the last time I remember you?”

“Oh, honey. It’s a long story.”

I give her a sideways glance.

“All right.” She sighs. “Did you know your mom was a volleyball player? She was brilliant, actually. She had that long, lean thing going for her, and no one had to tell her to be aggressive. She had scouts at her matches even in her junior year.”

I didn’t know any of this, because Mom never told me anything about anything past yesterday. But I can so picture it. Mom in spandex and a ponytail yelling “Spike!” and slamming the ball.

“So, what happened?” I ask, but Ginger is quiet. “Oh. Me… I happened.” There it is, the real reason Mom’s not calling. I interrupted her life, and she’s getting it back on track now. A hard lump lodges itself in my throat, even though I told myself we were both better off now. I still miss her. It’s not fair how much I miss her.

“Oh, honey,” Ginger says again, reading my face. “Your mom, from the very beginning, was so excited about you. She’d always wanted to be a mom. She would carry around old Barbies and baby them, all the way up until she was thirteen. I was the first one she told when she found out she was expecting. Did you know that? She was already pretty far along when she figured it out, but she told me first. It was spring of my sophomore year at the community college in Arkansas, and she just pulls up in front of the dorms in our parents’ busted-up Pontiac and yells my name until someone tells her which room I’m in. Then she comes running in waving that pregnancy test around.” Ginger laughs. “I told her to hold off on telling our parents. See if I couldn’t patch things up over the summer and then we could tell them together, but I guess she just couldn’t wait.”

“And they weren’t as excited as she was.”

Ginger sighs. “Your grandparents are very hard-minded people. Slip too low or too high on the ladder and you’re out. We Montgomery girls ‘just didn’t know our place,’ as they liked to say.”

“So what happened? I get why you don’t talk to your parents, but how come you and Mom didn’t stay close?”