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her tongue and kept at it, focused, so she never had to spit, never had to cough. Eventually, it wasn’t his rubbing, it was the dirt her tongue clicked back and forth that made her relax and allowed her to readjust.
    The calmness she felt now leaning against the oak in Linn Park was from that same place—the dust had simply moved from Louisiana to Alabama, had followed, that dust sifting now from the light to her, like the rugs in her apartment of chairs. Jennifer trapped those tiny particles, breathed them in, held them, and her lungs refused to let go.
    Every tree in Linn Park was covered, too, not quite dead, still in shock. Water no longer ran in the fountain that thetrees encircled, and the lower reflecting pools were also empty, overrun with people stepping in, out as if their movement were the only way to stay alive.
    On the envelope, she wrote her mother’s Chicago address,
355 Turner Avenue, Apt. 2118
, and started to put her own Fatama address in the left corner—Mathew was in Fatama, and maybe the letter had a chance of winding up at one of those places—but instead she wrote the date,
June 26, 2044
, and her name,
Jennifer Philips Harrison
. She didn’t have any liberty stamps and no way to get any—every store she had passed on Highway 11, every building was broken and blacked out. As soon as she left Birmingham, she’d mail the letters.
    She’ll worry if I don’t
, Jennifer reminded herself.
    Delia often said, “I just can’t stop thinking about things. Wish I could.”
    “I’d like to know about it, Mama, those things.”
    “Oh, don’t do that,” she’d say. “Don’t make me answer that.”
    Jennifer used to find her mother in the dining room, sitting with hands spread wide on the table, examining every crease, bend, and knot—when she checked her own palms, that’s all she found. Then her mama would wipe something from her face, lay her hands back on the table, open, close them, open them more, and wiggle her hips firmly into the wooden seat. Her mother had long hair, thick with streaks of gray that never trapped much dust, and she sat through the early morning, repeating the same ritual until Jennifer asked, “What’s wrong?” What else could her mama’s hands possibly carry?
    “Nothing, nothing, nothing.” That meant something was definitely wrong, those three words given so quickly, leaving Jennifer breathless, anxious. Somehow Delia Philips knew it, too. She scuffed the chair over the tile and walked into the kitchen. If Jennifer followed, her mamawould walk out of the kitchen to her bedroom, close and lock the door.
    All of Jennifer’s attempts to reverse the lock’s click with bobby pins and clothes hangers failed—they merely scratched at the hole in the doorknob. Sometimes Delia said, “Stop it.” Then the light inside the room would click off and all around the door blackness would seep into Jennifer’s toes and up through her body to her black hair. That’s when she felt the most empty and weak—as if she were being filled with cold black water, nothing to do until Terry got done at the mine.
    Louisiana and Mississippi were like that, whatever house they moved into on the Pearl River, the schools barely open for weeks, always closing. Like that.
    When Jennifer turned sixteen they kept the schools open for good, and she was in a classroom every night. She sat at her desk, and thought if only her mother had stayed at the table, had talked, then the loneliness they both felt could’ve been erased, or at least uprooted. But grief was something to endure alone—Delia insisted on it. First Everett’s passing—a flash flood at the Pearl River mine in Bogalusa, and Jennifer so young she could recall him only in fragments—the way he pitted the sofa cushions, his arms slumped and resting next to her, no jawline, eye line, hair, only his laugh—so loud and rumbling, it couldn’t be turned off.
    In her dreams, even the ones now, his laugh curled up like smoke and