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Off-key, as usual.
    After that, things were quiet for a while, then Mama asked, “Do you think I was selfish? Going off the way I did?”
    “It’s done, Cookie,” Martha Lee said. “You did what you had to do.”
    “That’s not what Goody’d say,” Mama said. “My mama’d surely say I was selfish. She’s called me selfish since I could walk, and I guess I can’t rightly argue with her. ‘You’re the center of your own universe, Dinah Mae,’ she’d say.”
    “What child isn’t?” Martha Lee said.
    “I guess I just didn’t outgrow it,” Mama said.
    “We seldom outgrow our foolishnesses, Cookie.”
    “Goody would say that’s dressing it up, calling it foolishness. She’d call it plain sin, what I did.”
    Sin?
A mosquito landed on my arm, but I didn’t flinch him off. I didn’t even breathe.
    “Lord, it’s confusing,” Mama said. “We’re given one life, and what we do with it—foolishness or glory or a mix of the two— is what we’ve got to answer for in the end.”
    “According to some,” Martha Lee said.
    I listened hard while Mama went right on. “And it doesn’t seem to matter if life is marked by days or weeks or years. It’s too little, whatever the measure. It’s a hard thing to figure, how to live life—the one life we’ve been given—and how to be true to yourself and to those you love. I just don’t know how to figure it out.”
    “Who does?” Martha Lee said.
    “I hope I have time left to do it in,” Mama said, and then added something more, but her voice was too soft to hear. When I stepped in closer, the porch floor creaked underfoot.
    “Little pitcher,” Mama called out. “Your ears will burn up, you go listening to what isn’t meant for you.”
    I backed away, back to the glider, and picked up my book. “What, Mama?” I called in my most innocent voice.
    I’d been glad to stop listening. My brain hurt with all Mama said about sin, and not being able to go home again, and the puzzle of attempting to be true to yourself. I retreated to the safe distance of life at Tara. I’d reached the part where Scarlett was thinking how Rhett knew exactly what she was thinking and how odious it was for a man to know what was in a woman’s mind.
    I sat on the glider and considered that idea. What if we could read minds? Then I would know everything my mama had been doing and what she was planning next. The snippets of conversation I heard about drove me mad. “Can you be sure?” . . . “see her again” . . . “give up hope” . . . “another big mistake.”
    If we could read minds, I thought, I’d have some warning if Mama was planning on leaving us again, which had been my big fear ever since she climbed out of Mr. Tinsley’s taxi, though I’d tried to erase the idea. I pictured us the night before, eating the dinner Mama had prepared and watching TV. I consoled myself with this image and the way things seemed to have returned to the way they were before Mama got the Hollywood dream stuck in her head.
    Much later, the sound of the refrigerator door closing brought me back. Then I thought I heard someone crying, but I must have been mistaken, because not one second later I heard the unmistakable sound of Mama’s laughter.
    The sun was straight overhead, and I was hungry.
    “Hi, darlin’,” Mama said when I went in. The tabletop was littered with empty Pabst bottles.
    Martha Lee was staring off through the window, avoiding my gaze. I got a can of tuna out of the cupboard. Mama reached for another Salem.
    “You sure you should?” Martha Lee said.
    A little late to be asking, I thought. The whole kitchen stank of smoke.
    “Don’t start,” Mama said, lighting up.
    “I mean that with my heart,” Martha Lee said. “Not as criticism.”
    “I know. I know.”
    When I turned to ask Mama if she wanted a sandwich, I caught the way they were looking at each other. I was mistaken about everything being like it used to be. Something had changed, but I didn’t