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full day hadn’t passed when Martha Lee showed up. Though I wanted to keep Mama to myself, I wasn’t completely sorry to see Martha Lee’s pickup turn into the yard. I’d been impatient for facts, and Martha Lee would see to it that Mama’d start talking. You could count on it. They didn’t have a secret between them.
    The second Martha Lee hit the ground, Mama was out the door and across the yard. They’d grabbed each other and started twirling in circles, squealing like baby pigs. I’d had to bite back a taste I knew was jealousy—Mama hadn’t acted half so happy to see me—and trailed after them as they headed for the house. With the two of them sitting in the kitchen, it was just like old times. Although it wasn’t yet ten A.M., Mama opened the refrigerator and got out a couple of bottles of beer. She set them on the table, not even bothering with glasses. Martha Lee took out a pack of Salems, lit two, then handed one to Mama. I hung around the door, trying to look invisible. This was my best chance to find out the precise details of what Mama had been doing for those months and whether she had come close to accomplishing what she’d set out for. Of course, Mama spotted me right off. “Tallie, sugar, be a good girl and go play. Martha Lee and me got some catching up to do. Girl talk.”
    “But I’m a girl.”
    Mama took a long drag on her Salem and gave me her
I’m not
fooling here
look. “Go on with you.”
    “But, Mama,” I’d wailed. This was my chance, and I couldn’t pass it up without a fight.
    “Go on, now. I mean it.”
    I’d slammed the screen door in protest, and sat on the glider, pretending to read about Scarlett and trying to overhear the conversation in the kitchen. By then I’d decided that, despite all the postcards with the hurried messages about her life at Paramount Pictures, Mama hadn’t gotten the part in the movie. Like she said, there sure wasn’t any Cadillac sitting in our drive. But if she hadn’t snagged the role, what had kept her out there for six months? And why wasn’t she telling me?
    I slid off the swing and crept closer to the door, taking care to step over the board that squeaked.
    “Tallie’s grown,” Mama said. “She’s nearly a woman. Lord, it nearly broke my heart to look at her.”
    I felt a flash of satisfaction and crept even closer, though it meant risking discovery.
    “She was the one I was nervous about. After her, I knew Luddy would be easy.”
    “Luddy will always be easy where you’re concerned, Deanie,” Martha Lee said. Something in her voice almost made my daddy’s love for Mama sound like a failing.
    Mama gave a sigh. I heard the scratch of a match, and a minute later cigarette smoke came through the screen onto the porch. “Lord, it’s weird to be back,” Mama said. “Like swimming under water with your eyes open.”
    I heard her inhale deeply, then expel a lungful of smoke. “I mean, things seem the same, yet changed. Not just Tallie growing up. Little things, too. Dishes stacked in different cupboards. Chairs moved. Like it’s not my house anymore.”
    “What did you expect?” Martha Lee said.
    “I don’t know,” Mama said.
    “It’s been six months. Things change.”
    I looked around. Not one thing about our house seemed changed to me.
    “Maybe it’s like that writer said,” Mama said. “Maybe we really can’t go home again.”
    My heart stopped beating.
    “Or maybe,” Mama continued, “maybe that poet got it right. Maybe home is the place where when you go there, they have to take you in.”
    Have to take you in?
Didn’t Mama think we wanted her here? Was she mad because I’d changed a few dishes around? Was she going to leave again? If she did, would it be my fault?
    “Maybe both are true,” Martha Lee said.
    “Sometimes,” Mama said, “sometimes I think all opposites are true.” She gave a little laugh and started to sing “I’m just a walking contradiction” in her Kristofferson imitation.