My cousin Scott was relieved that my aunt was not at home. He’d come home from practice with a black eye. He was sitting on the couch in the living room with a bag of frozen peas and carrots pressed to his face. Dad came in when he dropped me off at Aunt Arlene’s on [...]

When I was born my mother had her sister, her bowling league and all her friends who were (for the most part) young mothers too. When my first child was born I was deep academia–so outside the world of women that I might as well have been at the bottom of a well. So to [...]

In college I studied history. I like stories; I like facts, always have. Perhaps I gravitated toward the history department because I trusted in the certainty of research. Research seemed the art of polite inquiry. Nothing gritty, like journalists fighting for a story, pumping unsavory sources for information. Research was so graceful that when handling [...]

Mom stood there on the sidewalk with her mouth half hanging open. The window shears at the nearest house, a pursed face with tangerine lipstick flashed. Mom did not want to put herself in the position of being declared respectable by the owner of that disapproving face. Later the sisters would have reason to wish [...]

Even though it was overcast the heat hung like a fog by the time the sisters finally found a parking place for the Buick. Able to see where the needed to go from the where the helicopters were circling and how the bumper-to-bumper traffic thwarted the Buick from where Mom tried to steer it. They’d [...]

Mom wished she’d taken the other bridge, though she had no reason to believe that I-55 would have taken her where she wanted to go any more directly. The road they were on, and the car they were in, went off toward the North, through the tip of Memphis and into the areas promising exits [...]

To get into Memphis from the west the Buick had to cross the Mississippi on either the Memphis-Arkansas Memorial Bridge or the Hernando-Desoto Bridge. Mom meant to take the southern most of the two bridges, having to change from the I-40 to the I-55. As she drove toward the river where the traffic continued to [...]

Mom stopped at a gas station just outside Lonoke, Arkansas. The young man who’d pumped her gas warned her that they’d never get anywhere near “Gracelynn.” “Never got many questions about Gracelynn, but today you’re the…” his eyes stared at the cloudy sky, “eighth carload so far.” He snuck a peek through the back window [...]

There was this girl, Sharon Gregory, who started at my school mid-way through my fifth grade year. That someone came to join our insular world of Mason Elementary School was enough to make her fascinating. It was generally known (thought I don’t remember how—maybe we whispered it while waiting in the four-square line) that Sharon [...]

The waitress came over, carrying a coffee pot and smiling widely. “Now gals, hold on there. Don’t go getting wound up and having a fight.” She pulled a fresh fork from her apron pocket and set it down in front of Aunt Arlene. “You’all got a long way to go yet.” Both sisters politely refused [...]