I was living in her house now, I was the oldest woman in the family; it was me who had to look after Daddy, me who had the child on the way. And I, who had been so sure of myself and who I was—not Momma, mostly—felt myself begin to melt in the May heat, my edges running, my outlines less definite. I was not the daughter I had been, for my mother was gone. My job was gone too, and the safe future I had always meant to make with my actuary’s money. I had tried to find a lover in Bill first, then Greg; both had seen my mother instead of me. I had tried to give away Momma’s gods and her gods had forbidden it. Even my body was for the first time not wholly my own. There was another person growing in me, who would have a different face and story, and for the first time I found myself wondering what my mother had thought when it was me growing in her belly. Could I really have been as strange and different a being to her as the baby in my womb already was to me?
