Ginger runs a hand through her hair and snaps at the hair tie around her wrist.

“Your mom moved out of our parent’s house, but she didn’t leave town right away. She floated around with friends. After you were born, she got a job cleaning rich people’s houses. They let her bring you along. You loved it—all the clients’ kids’ toys and Elmo on the big flat screens.”

I don’t remember any of this. But I can picture this, too. Mom at eighteen, nineteen, twenty, cleaning toilets and folding neat corners into bedsheets while I stack other kids’ Legos.

“I was just about to graduate law school when we met up at that farm to pick strawberries. Jill and I had talked about moving in together. I’d already interned at the law firm here in Nashville, and I knew they’d offer me a job. All I had to do was pass the bar exam.”

“But?”

“But I made a mistake. I offered your mom some money. I had a little savings, and I knew there’d be more coming my way. So I said I could pay her share of the rent and help with her tuition if she wanted to start taking some community-college classes somewhere.”

I lived with Mom for twelve years. Ginger doesn’t need to tell me what happened next.

“She got mad,” I say.

“She got mad.”

“Because you were giving her a ‘handout.’ ”

“Yes.”

This was my mom. She’d take a free sandwich from Joe’s after a show with a “please and thank you,” but try to give her “charity” and she’d just as soon spit in your eye. It had to be some kind of trade or nothing at all. There was a lady once, in Biloxi, the mom of a girl from my class. I guess she noticed my raggedy jeans and the hole in my Keds. Or maybe it was that I wore the same striped T-shirt almost every day. Anyway, she brought a whole bag of clothes to school for me. Skirts from the Gap and collared shirts from H&M already soft from washing. There was a whole pile of shoes, too. But when Mom caught me trying them on in our motel room that night, she made me pack every single thing back up and return it the next day. I cried all the way to school with the bag sitting next to me on the bus.

“Did you ever try to see her again?” I ask Ginger. And by “her” I really mean “me.”

“Oh, Lou, of course I did. But she just… disappeared. No forwarding address. No phone number. Nothing. Apart from the occasional postcard, she was off the map. Honey—” Her voice breaks. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I am just now getting to know you.”