Night. My gut burns in the bottom of my belly. Searing, deep, starting on the right and spreading left. A smoldering fire is buried in me. Toss. Turn. It is worse lying down, worse yet on my side. I bring my knees to my chest. “Boy,” my grandmother calls, and I run. Apple pie. Mother is back. She comes out of the door and stands in the yard, white and gold, porcelain and milky glass. Everything is good and right. She smiles. She laughs. So fragile, so cracked. She is the former Tomato Queen. Queen for a day in Morgan County, in the tiny town of Bath, of Berkeley Springs, buried in the Mountain State, West Virginia. “You and I,” she says a few days after she’s back—we’re still staying at my grandmother’s house. “We’ll take a little trip. We’ll go back to see where I was raised.” My grandmother, bent over the oranges, elbow bearing down, shakes her head. “It’s not up for discussion,”
