Everything started when a mother came to town. Quiet and all alone, she got off a Greyhound bus across the street from a conveniently placed strip club. Had on fake pearls and a red lace-front wig. Her daughter picked her up in a shiny new Jaguar with two seats and the top down. After maybe thirty minutes of silent riding, the mother was standing at the window in the big house—there were pillars out front and all. She was looking away from everything beautiful behind her. Clutching her purse like she wasn’t staying. Thinking. Trying to decide how she should tell her smiling baby girl, who always wanted more than she could hold in her arms, that she ought to get on the next bus and go back to Memphis with her. “I don’t know why you didn’t accept the tickets I sent you. First-class flight? I thought you’d like that,” Val, her daughter, said. Maybe she was sipping her mimosa or waiting for the maid to pour her another glass. “Memphis ain’t but a stone’s throw away,” the mother mumbled.
