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parent.” She eased back into her recliner and opened the book, pointing to a photo of a woman who looked like the two of us, holding a tiny baby. The date on the faded photo read 1971. “This was my mother,” she said. “Gloria Palermo. She got pregnant out of wedlock, forcing her deeply religious family to shun her.”
    “Because she got pregnant?” I asked, shocked.
    Maya was sad as she shook her head. “She had many demons, Jordana. She had been a problem student and had fallen in with the wrong crowd. Her parents wanted to show her that life has certain consequences.”
    I was heartbroken as I looked in the face of my maternal grandmother. Her dark eyes were so sad, so defeated.
    “She tried to take care of me on her own, but she was so young and unprepared. She accidentally scalded me in a hot bath and the authorities stepped in. No one could ever prove it wasn’t intentional, and according to court records she didn’t try that hard. As soon as she wasn’t taking care of a screaming baby full time, her party friends came back in force. Before the case was closed, she died of a drug overdose. I grew up in that Jersey orphanage.”
    She flipped a page to show a picture of her and my dad, presumably as they were on the road after leaving New Jersey. Maya was considerably thinner, but still wore about thirty pounds of extra weight.
    She was crazy in love w ith my dad. It was obvious in the way she stared up at him like he hung the moon.
    “Joey told me about the summers he would spend with his aunt in Iowa,” she continued.
    “Aunt Verna,” I supplied. I remembered spending a few summers with her before my dad died. She had an old tire hanging from the big oak tree in her back yard, which overlooked a creek nearby. Daddy loved to go to that two-story house just twenty miles south of Oswen almost more than anything. He claimed he could smell her home-cooking from ten miles away.  He’d help her in her vegetable garden and pluck apples and plums and nuts from the trees growing on her vast property. Aunt Verna was famous for her plum jam and her Dutch apple pie.
    I had eaten way more than my share as a kid.
    I also chased her chickens around the yard and made friends with the lanky dog who would lounge under the porch of that hundred-year-old farmhouse. It was a picture right out of the Saturday Evening Post. Apparently Daddy thought so too.
    “ He told me all about this place with wide open spaces and a clear blue sky, full of honest, hardworking people. Real salt of the earth. It sounded like a fairy tale. We headed west the first chance we got, working our way from place to place, until we saved up enough to buy a car and finish our journey.”
    She flipped another page. There were several photos of both Joey and Maya on Aunt Verna’s farm. But Daddy never looked happier than when Marianne was in the photo with him. Aunt Verna had taken Marianne under her wing at the church, which was how they met. That much I knew from my mother, who had conveniently forgotten to tell me she’d been disowned for having an abortion.
    It seemed like far too many members of my family tree were willing to cut off their own limbs whenever it suited them.
    No wonder I was a huge mess.
    But no doubt Marianne would have left out that part of her history when she was cozying up to Aunt Verna, just like she hid it from my dad.
    Yet with all of her faults, she managed to pull herself back onto her feet and carve out a new life for herself. I had newfound respect for that, especially after hearing what happened to my grandmother, Gloria… or seeing what became of my biological mother.
    Marianne Hemphill may have been a cold-hearted, lying shrew, but I never wanted for anything she was able to provide. It was just my misfortune “security” and “affection” could not be found in her particular wheelhouse.
    The next set of pictures Maya showed me included her pregnancy. Daddy virtually glowed through each and every picture, as