Everything that used to work didn’t.

Even with the air-conditioning cranked up, she was hot. She kicked the covers off during the night and lay there fuming, and during the day she wore tank shirts and boxer shorts around the house. She couldn’t stand her hair touching her face and neck. She was always “sweating like a hog.” One time Ava made the mistake of reminding her that hogs don’t sweat. “Come over here and feel my chest, then,” Caroline snapped, which caused Ava, and everyone else, to flee the room.

She was awful to her husband. She once informed him that she never wanted to have sex again … with anyone, she assured him. She couldn’t stand anyone “at her, wanting something.” Then, another time, she blurted out that she felt like having sex with every man she saw. Well, almost every man, she added, as if that made her statement more palatable.

“Me, too?” Vic had asked, just to humor her, she could tell, because, well, she was a sweaty hog with scary ponytails.

Even though she didn’t have high expectations, when they did have sex she had to conceal the feeling afterward that it hadn’t been worth the bother. Maybe she was done with the whole nonsense. How depressing was that?

She was awful to her children. To her own dear children! She was used to having her hands full, but this summer, because of the older kids’ developmental lags, the adolescent desire for distance from one’s parents seemed to come over all three of her children at the same time. Caroline couldn’t engage any of them in conversation. She got only monosyllabic answers to her questions, eye rolling, deep sighing. Of course, she was in demand as a driver, as there were doctor’s appointments; counseling appointments; Suzi’s soccer practice; Ava’s piano lessons and classes at the community college, where she was finishing up her first year; carting Otis to his part-time job at McDonald’s and to Sunny Side High School, when he didn’t have gas money for his Pontiac; and of course there was always shopping, laundry, meal preparation, fight referee—but she could do all these things on autopilot. On many occasions her presence was required, and her cooperation was always expected, but she was supposed to perform her duties and stay in the background.

She often felt helplessly reduced to her children’s level. Below their level. One time she slapped Ava in the face for getting an F on her take-home algebra exam—she’d spent hours working on it and then forgotten to turn it in. Another time she scattered Suzi’s basket of clean laundry in the front yard because Suzi wouldn’t fold it. She held her nose around Otis because he stank like McDonald’s and refused to take a shower. After these occurrences her family had to endure her self-flagellation and profuse, weepy apologies. There were more incidents like this than she cared to count.

She was awful to her poor father, who enraged her by sitting at the kitchen table, patiently drinking coffee, waiting for her to read the newspaper to him because he couldn’t see well anymore, or waiting for her to take him to a doctor’s appointment or out to Target or CVS or Lake Ella to look at ducks. She’d taken to hiding from him in her bedroom, wondering how it could be that she had another person to take care of, cursing her gadabout younger brother who couldn’t take care of an ingrown toenail, hoping that the old man would finally give up and shuffle back downstairs to his little bedroom.

Her father’s presence in her home was a constant reminder that she’d never had a mother—a fact that she’d been more successful at suppressing when he was living back in Iowa. The old question kept resurfacing—what had her father done to run her mother off? The answer to this question had never been obvious. Caroline had never seen him drink more than the occasional glass of wine, and there was no evidence that he’d spent money wildly—but he hadn’t clutched at it in a miserly way either. He’d lavished love and attention on the two wives—one nice, one mean—that he’d had after Mary Conner. He’d never shown signs of being a philanderer. But her mother wouldn’t have left behind a nine-month-old baby girl unless Wilson had done something to force her away. He’d never been willing to talk much about it, not while Caroline was growing up and not now. He didn’t talk much about anything anymore. On her worst days it seemed like he was simply there in her house to remind her of her mother, to give her more work to do, and then to die where she’d be the one to find him.

She was tired of being awful to the people she loved, but since she couldn’t stop being awful, the only alternative was to get away from all of them. Leave them far behind so as not to expose them to her anger. Maybe this was how her own mother had felt—that her family would be better off without her. But her mother had left a tiny baby! And never came back! Caroline would only be taking a sabbatical from grown and half-grown people who either resented her or took her for granted, or both—not leaving for good, just until she stopped wanting to slap them all silly. Suzi dismissed her. Otis patronized her. Being around Vic the way he was now—middle-aged—frightened her, because when she really noticed him, she was reminded of who they used to be and never would be again. Two people who’d backpacked in New Mexico on their honeymoon. Who’d howled with wolves from a canoe in northern Minnesota. Who, when they couldn’t afford cable TV, watched Lawrence Welk on Saturday nights so they could dance to Myron Floren’s accordion. Then the kids came along, and everything was different but always a new adventure. Now she felt like they were waiting for it all to be over. She couldn’t wait anymore. She wouldn’t. Next! But what was next? Leaving was next. It was the only option she could come up with, because she was losing her mind.

The truth was, Caroline had been losing it for a while. But she didn’t want to go down without a fight.

Three years ago, when she turned forty-five, after having spent most of her life laughing at the suckers who’d buy such things, she started hemorrhaging money on expensive face creams with pseudoscientific names that promised miracles. She would apply each cream hopefully and study herself in the mirror, asking her husband periodically if she looked any different, and every time he said, “Yeah, sure,” until she stopped believing him. Around this time she started wearing T-shirts with skeletons and rhinestones on them and, with her already-tattooed friend Billie, she went downtown and got the names of her three kids tattooed on her left shoulder. Her family was horrified, which pleased her.

But after a while all this age-fending-off behavior started feeling like wasted energy, a finger in the dike. The sure prospect of old age and death hits different people at different ages. For Caroline, forty-eight was the magic year. She turned forty-eight on May 2, 2006.

The day after her forty-eighth birthday, that dreadful birthday when she couldn’t get out of bed, Caroline dumped all her expensive face creams in the trash and gave all her rock T-shirts to Ava, since Suzi tended more toward stripes and Nike swooshes. That’s when she started in with the boxer shorts and tank shirts and the little ponytails and the simmering anger and longing to run away, the same shameful longing that her mother must’ve felt, and then Mrs. So-called Nancy Archer appeared in her living room, the first time when Suzi invited her, the second time when she dropped by with a book about Elvis—one of those huge coffee table books of photographs that end up in the remainder pile at Barnes & Noble.

The poor woman had lugged that big useless book three blocks in the heat. She was so thin and pale and dry, and not a smear of sweat anywhere on her—it was like she was trying to mock Caroline, who was red-faced and sweaty and not yet back—mentally, that is—from her morning run. She and Vic used to run together, but now, because he went in to work so early, he got up to run at five a.m. Caroline ran slower when she ran by herself, but she tried to stay in decent shape, which meant something different at age forty-eight than it did at age twenty-eight.

She didn’t know what to make of this insistent old lady. Caroline didn’t trust her, but what could she do but invite her in?

“Well, for a few minutes,” Nance said in her breathy voice, stepping quickly into the house.

Oh, but this was an opportunity, Caroline realized. Vic was at work, Ava supposedly studying in her room, Otis at Sunny Side High School, and Suzi at Miccosukee Middle School. Her father was in the den, and she would get to witness the meeting between Nance and her father. It would be a big moment. Either it would be a reunion between her parents, or else a first meeting of two strangers. She’d surely be able to tell which one it was when she saw it happening.

She suggested that Nance set the Elvis book on the dining room table so Ava could look at it later. Then she explained that she’d just finished reading the New York Times to Wilson, who liked to be kept abreast of the news, and that the two of them were now working on the crossword puzzle—they did it on Mondays and Tuesdays but after that, forget it, it was too hard.

“I’d love to help, but I’m not too good at crosswords,” Nance said in the dim hallway.

“Neither are we,” Caroline said, wondering if poor crossword solving skill was genetic.

The previous evening, after Nance had left their house, Caroline called her best friend, Billie, and told her what she suspected. It was when Nance mentioned having lived in Memphis when her father had and having been a patient at the clinic where he worked that Caroline began to feel that there was something else going on with Nance, a hidden agenda. Then when Nance talked about the daughter she hadn’t gotten to see grow up, the suspicion began to form in Caroline’s mind. She knew that her mother had met her father at that clinic—that her mother, Mary, had been a patient there. And the daughter she hadn’t known? Might that be Caroline? And then there were the identical birthmarks—the same place on Mary in the wedding photo and on so-called Nancy Archer.

She knew better than to tell Vic what she suspected—he’d tell her she was imagining things and accuse her of letting Billie egg her on. It was true—Billie did egg her on, but that’s what any good friend would do.

“My God!” Billie said to Caroline on the phone that night. “She could be your mother. But why has she come now? What does she want? Why the secrecy?”

“Exactly,” Caroline said, feeling slightly sick and dizzy. She was sitting in her own living room, usually her favorite place in the world. Who had picked out that pink floor lamp? Who were the innocent-faced children in those watercolor portraits?

“Maybe she’s afraid you hate her,” Billie suggested. “If it is her, she’s got a reason to be afraid. Abandoning you like that.”

“I don’t hate her,” Caroline said but knew she’d spoken too quickly. Her feelings about her mother changed periodically—had gone through various permutations over the years, and could even bounce all over the map—anger, sadness, longing, acceptance, hatred—in one hour. “Maybe she just went out of her mind and had to leave,” Caroline had said to Billie, and Billie snorted.

“She’s still out of her mind, if she’s showing up and pretending to be someone else.”

And now she’d shown up again! It was an opportunity for a do-over. During Nance’s earlier visit, Caroline had gotten more and more addle-brained when she began to suspect Nance of being her mother. She had acted rashly, pretending to have forgotten Nance’s name and called her Mary. Nance had seemed startled, but really, who wouldn’t have been if they’d been called Mary out of the blue? Right now Caroline had no proof of anything, there were only some odd coincidences and her own intuition. Today she would remain calm. She would strive for detached curiosity. Not an easy state for her to achieve these days, but she’d try.

She led Nance back into the little sitting room where her father hung out. Each time she entered that oppressive room she was struck again by the old man smell. Sometimes she felt like everyone in her house was trying to take it over, take up all the air and space and sound waves until there was nothing left for her. The big old farmhouse she and Vic had rented in Iowa haunted her. The quiet. The space. And they’d been so eager to fill it up with kids! What the hell were they thinking?

Her father, the old man who smelled, sat in his favorite chair near the TV, the nubby chair with the permanent imprint of his butt in the cushion. They’d have to throw it away when he died. Not that she ever thought about that.

“You must be Dr. Spriggs!” Nance gushed. “So good to finally meet you.” She glanced around the room and then arranged herself on the love seat across from him, settling in among the pages of the newspaper.

Her father stared at Nance in bewilderment.

If this woman was his long-lost wife, wouldn’t he recognize her? True, it would have been forty-eight years ago that she left him, and his mind was going. But maybe he was only pretending not to recognize her.

Nance kept staring at him, looking him slowly up and down.

Wilson Spriggs was a commanding presence, even in his old age. If you saw him working in the yard, you might think, if you were a certain age yourself: why it’s Cary Grant’s look-alike! The old Cary Grant, when he wore those cool black glasses. And if you were to stop and talk to him, you’d think that he must be a paid advertisement for Geritol. Clear-eyed and friendly but not overfamiliar. If you talked to him only briefly, you would never suspect that his mind was slipping. Wilson still radiated that doctor vibe: I’m important! Pay heed! The man had been married three times, the last two times to adoring nurses. But now he was unshaven, wearing his hideous brown bathrobe. If Caroline had known that Nance was coming over, she might’ve insisted that her father get dressed and shave. She felt like a matchmaker.

Nance didn’t appear to be smitten. She now gazed at him with a stony expression that contradicted her earlier gushiness. “Finally,” Nance muttered. “Wilson Spriggs, in the flesh. As I live and breathe.” And then, in a louder voice, “Yep, still living and breathing here, Wilson Spriggs!”

“Me, too,” Wilson said in a jovial way.

“So I see. Dr. Spriggs.” Nancy Archer, or Mary Conner, seemed to be harboring resentment toward Wilson. How could she resent him if she didn’t know him? Interesting.

“Nancy Archer is our new neighbor.” Caroline had to speak loudly, because her father wouldn’t wear his hearing aid. She was speaking too loudly, but she didn’t care. “She brought Ava an Elvis book.”

“Good morning,” he said to Nance, and smiled like his old charming self.

Nance refused coffee, and glanced at Caroline expectantly. Entertain me, is what her expression said. Christ, another person who wanted to be taken care of. If this woman was her mother, had she come expecting Caroline to nurse her in her twilight years? Was she looking for a handout? Nance had claimed to have plenty of money, but was that true? There were many questions that must be answered, and answered to Caroline’s satisfaction.

Back in Iowa City, when Caroline was in junior high school, Wilson had told her what he knew about her mother, which was disappointingly little. The two of them had known each other only two months before they got married, Wilson explained, and they got married only because Mary was expecting a baby. Mary was eighteen at the time, a country girl from Arkansas who’d come up to the city to seek her fortune. Wilson claimed he knew nothing about her family or exactly where she’d grown up. How could you not know those things? Caroline had always wondered.

Later on, when Caroline was in high school and Wilson was married to wife number three, he revealed to Caroline what had happened the day Mary disappeared back in 1959. He’d dropped Mary and baby Caroline at his mother’s house in suburban Memphis and had gone off to do some errands downtown. When he returned a couple of hours later, Mary was gone. What did he mean, gone? She wasn’t there. She’d left. Didn’t he ask his mother what had happened? Sure, but his mother swore to her dying day that she didn’t see Mary leave and didn’t know why or where she’d gone. Didn’t he try to find her? Sure he did. He checked with all their friends, visited all their old hangouts, like the Arcade and the Tick Tock. He even put an ad in the paper. No, she never asked for any of her things. Oddly enough, Wilson said, his mother’s precious grand piano also disappeared a few days after Mary did, and his mother claimed that she’d just felt like selling it. Wilson immediately suspected that his mother, who’d never liked Mary, had offered to give her the piano if she’d disappear, but he didn’t voice his suspicions to his mother, who would’ve denied it. So had Mary been a music lover? Had she ever taken piano lessons or expressed an interest in playing piano? No, Mary had never shown much interest in any kind of music. But what kind of person would swap an object they didn’t care about for their own baby? Mary, apparently. What kind of person would deprive a child of her mother? The child’s grandmother, evidently. Why would you suspect your own mother of secretly bribing your wife to leave and then lying about it? He did, and he couldn’t explain why. The whole thing was too vexing to think about.

Caroline had long since given up expecting her mother to show up on her birthdays or to call, even send a card. Maybe that’s why she’d always hated her birthday. So what had prompted her might-be mother to return now?

Keep quiet until you’re sure, Caroline told herself. She sat down at the other end of the love seat, picked up the paper, shook it, and read, too loudly, “Six-letter word for animus.”

“Romulus and Remus,” said Nance in a singsong voice.

Okay. Caroline took a sip of her cooling coffee. “Dad? Animus.”

He shook his head slowly. “Do we know any letters?”

“No! I told you that.”

“Hate,” he said.

“Six! Letters!”

“Betty Bordney fairy sway,” Nance said, and snorted with laughter.

Her father laughed, too, a startling sound. Caroline hadn’t heard her father laugh in ages. The crossword puzzle segment of their morning was usually done in a businesslike manner, because it was one of the things the doctor had said they needed to do to help keep Wilson’s memory intact. Caroline had suspected that her father didn’t enjoy it much either.

“Who is Betty Bordney?” Wilson asked Nance.

“A lady I knew. In Memphis. A nurse. Betty Bordney fairy sway. That’s what we used to call her. Or was it Betty fairy Bordner sway?”

“Did you hate her?” Wilson asked. “Was there animus between you?”

“Oh, no. The opposite. She and I had a lesbian affair.”

Wilson blanched, uncomfortable about such things being said boldly aloud.

Was her mother a lesbian? Was that why she left? Caroline felt hysterical laughter bubbling up and tried to swallow it.

“Just playing with ya,” Nance said. “I’m not a lesbian.”

“Betty Bordney sounds like a cow,” Wilson said.

“And fairy sway sounds like a dairy dessert.”

“Moo,” Wilson said.

What the hell? Was this an inside joke from when they were married? Caroline broke out into snickers, clamped her lips together, then exploded with laughter. She laughed and tried to stop and stopped and started up again, the way she and Vic used to laugh, the way she and her high school buddies used to laugh, the way she never laughed anymore; and she kept it up until she was crying. No. Not that. She finally got control and wiped her eyes with a handy napkin.

Both Nance and her father were staring at her, her father with a worried smile and Nance with a big pumpkin grin. This Nance was a different person than the one who’d sat in their living room a couple of days earlier—the old Nance had been earnest and eager to please, even if she hadn’t been convincing talking up her and Suzi’s trip to Italy.

“I’m sorry, kids,” Caroline said in a jolly voice. She dabbed her eyes and blew her nose. “Let’s get back to the crossword puzzle. Okay. Thirty-two down. An eight-letter word for nocturnal creature.”

“Huh,” Wilson said. He glanced over at Nance.

Nance pursed her thin little lips and shook her head. “Armadillo?”

“That’s nine letters,” Caroline said. “Good guess though.”

“I saw an armadillo in your yard just now,” Nance said. “He squeezed out from under that shed in the back.”

“That’s my pet armadillo,” Wilson said. “Animus.”

“Tee-hee,” Nance said.

Caroline set down the newspaper. She picked up her coffee cup, wanting to hurl it across the room. “Anyone else want coffee?”

They both refused, eager, Caroline felt, to get rid of her.

When she returned, blowing on her third cup of the morning, Nance was reading an article from the paper aloud to Wilson, her voice changing when there were quotes. Caroline always read the paper in a bored monotone. Nance must’ve been able to tell, just by being around Wilson for a short time, that he was in dire need of levity and a fresh face.

Caroline stood in the doorway to listen. She studied the old woman’s sharp features. She could see no resemblance at all between Nance and herself.

“Frank Comas,” Nance read in a newscaster’s voice, “a physician, appeared before the president’s advisory committee to defend the work done by the Oak Ridge doctors.” Here Nance’s voice changed to a basso profundo. “ ‘It is with some sadness and also some annoyance, I must confess, that I am obliged to try to exonerate ourselves for something perceived by some as devilish acts where science was God and damn all other considerations.’ ”

Wilson sat in his chair, head down, his fingers twined together in his lap. Caroline hoped he wasn’t falling asleep. It was odd. She’d just read most of that section of the paper to Wilson, and she didn’t recall the article that Nance was now reading.

Nance went on reading, something about a committee and a hearing, blah, blah, blah. Caroline stood and listened for another minute—well, not really listening but watching her father to make sure he seemed content—and then, with a slightly lighter heart, she drifted away.

She knew she should stay away from Ava, but somehow she found herself in the hallway outside Ava’s door, where she often ended up, back at the scene of her many failures to communicate with her daughter, wondering whether or not she should go in to make sure she was studying for her algebra test. Ava, when she was involved in some activity, could react angrily to being interrupted. Caroline knew this from years of experience, but of its own accord her hand was on the doorknob, turning it, and she was looking into the room where Ava sat cross-legged on the bed, studying a book, the big book of Elvis photographs Nance had just brought over. How had she gotten hold of it so fast?

The sound of Elvis’s melodramatic, self-mocking voice came from Ava’s room from morning until late at night. “Polk salad Annie, / the gators got your granny.”

“Ava,” Caroline said now. “Please turn the music down.”

Ava ignored her.

“Shouldn’t you be studying algebra?”

Ava kept studying the photographs, hunched over, her dark hair hiding her face, the fingers of one hand busily rattling the corner of the page she was looking at. She sat surrounded by all her Elvis memorabilia—her Elvis posters, Jailhouse Rock Elvis clock, Teddy Bear Elvis pillows, Aloha Elvis lamp. She wore a new Elvis T-shirt, a fitted pink one which showcased the fifties Elvis. When had she gotten that one? How had she paid for it? “Ava!”

Finally Ava glanced up at her, disoriented, like she’d just woken up. “This has some pictures in it I’ve never seen before,” she said. “From when he lived in Germany. Where’d this come from?”

Caroline explained that Nance had brought it, which made Ava sit up straighter and smile. If only Ava weren’t so beautiful, Caroline thought for the millionth time, and then scolded herself for thinking such a dumb thing, for wishing ugliness on a girl who already had the cards stacked against her.

“After you finish studying, there’s some forms you need to sign,” she told Ava. “For Rhodes College.”

Ava kept looking at the book.

Elvis sang that he was just a roustabout. Going from town to town.

Caroline marched over and pulled the plug on the iPod dock. “We need to get those forms in the mail as soon as possible.”

Ava, surrounded by pictures of Elvis, kept looking at the book with a little smile on her face that indicated total absorption. Mother did not exist. Nothing else existed but Elvis.

Caroline considered her options. She could go get the forms from her desk and thrust them in front of Ava’s face. She could rip the Elvis book from Ava’s hands. She could thrust the math book in front of Ava and yell at her about passing math and how she wouldn’t get into Rhodes College if she didn’t pass math this time. Ava would scream back at her that she didn’t care, didn’t care about math or college or anything and just wanted to be left alone, and she might even start in yelling about how dumb she was, how ugly, how fat, and even start hitting herself, until Caroline ran from the room holding in tears.

This scene had happened many times, even though Caroline knew better than to start it, knew better because of all the years of therapy they’d had and books she’d read about how to deal with Asperger’s syndrome; but it was hard to act like a calm, disinterested therapist with your own child.

Caroline, like all the other mothers she knew who had autistic kids, had become the designated therapy parent in the family. Vic’s only contribution to their therapy was to get the kids hooked on watching reruns of Seinfeld. He pointed out that the show was all about social gaffes and miscommunication, and, who knows, it could be that watching Seinfeld and afterward discussing the many ways that Kramer, Jerry, Elaine, and George screw up might help Ava and Otis more than anything. Could be, Caroline agreed, but we can’t just stop there. Sometimes she admired and envied his ability to stay aloof, but other times it maddened her. She needed help and he wouldn’t help her. She knew it was good for the kids to have one calm person in the family, but why did it have to be him?

When Caroline got Ava diagnosed at age nine, she flung herself into trying to fix her. She quit teaching preschool in order to devote herself full-time to the cause. There were the no-wheat no-dairy diets that the family endured for only a month before Caroline called it quits, then the vitamin and mineral supplements, physical therapy, occupational therapy, Relationship Development Intervention, HANDLE neurological therapy, chelation—removal of toxic heavy metals that might be making things worse—tutoring, counseling, support groups, psychiatrists, etc., etc., etc. The trouble was that all these so-called therapies were very expensive, and they never had any measurable results. Caroline could never tell what worked and what didn’t work, because they did many things at once. They had to. They couldn’t afford to waste any time.

And Ava did seem to get better, leaving some of her bigger, more obvious problems behind her—such as public temper tantrums and huge social gaffes—but that could have been due to growing up as much as to any treatment.

Otis, when he was about five, was also diagnosed, but in a pro forma way. Caroline and Vic saw the signs early on—the stiffness, clumsiness, intolerance of change, lack of desire for physical contact, precocious verbal development. But by this time Caroline was so exhausted by her efforts with Ava, and she was so depressed about Otis having the same problems, that she couldn’t bring herself to try every new treatment that came down the pike on Otis—and there were new theories and treatments popping up on the Asperger’s Web sites every week. As a result, Otis had no special therapies whatsoever, nothing but what he got in school, and it was hard to see that he was any worse off, or better off, than Ava. The awful truth: she had the energy to try and fix only one of them.

Suzi turned out to be their comfort child. Caroline and Vic watched baby Suzi fixedly, and when they saw no signs of autism they were so relieved they couldn’t even speak of their joy, and the guilt they felt about their joy. Caroline would carry Suzi around, reveling in her affection and attentiveness, and then some kind of internal alarm would go off and she’d shove Suzi aside and go running back to Ava, whom, she thought, really needed her.

Caroline, because of all this intense activity, had come to depend on Ava’s disability to give her life focus. For years she’d been quietly anxious at the thought of Ava moving out on her own, but that ended once she got the idea of sending Ava to Rhodes College. Now it made her panicky when she considered the possibility of Ava flunking algebra for the second time, of her not having the grades to transfer from Tallahassee Community College to Rhodes College in Memphis, where she’d decided that Ava had to go, because—although she hadn’t told anyone except her best friend, Billie—she planned on moving to Memphis with Ava and living in an apartment in midtown while Ava lived in a dorm and went to college.

Ava would need her to be close by, she’d tell Vic. And you and Suzi and Otis are doing fine here. What would she do about her father? Vic shouldn’t, couldn’t take care of Wilson. She could hire someone. Maybe Nance! Or maybe the two of them would realize that they still loved each other and get married again. Everything would all work out. It had to work out. Of course, Ava could stay here and go to FSU, but it was such a huge school, so big that she wouldn’t make friends and her professors wouldn’t know her and she’d flounder, whereas Rhodes was small, had small classes, and the professors wouldn’t let her slip through the cracks. The kids would be nicer, more motivated, more accepting. And the thing was—if Ava stayed here, then Caroline wouldn’t have an excuse to leave herself.

Caroline had no idea, until she visited Memphis last December, how tired she was of the whole kit and caboodle at home. Trying to keep everything running smoothly. Anticipating everyone’s needs. Nodding and pretending to be interested while her husband droned on and on about portfolio scoring. Driving the same routes over and over again, passing the same Tire Kingdom and BP station and the Melting Pot fondue restaurant where a customer’s hair and face had once caught on fire—every time she drove by she felt compelled to imagine it—and the Christian School with the electronic billboard informing you that All Roads Lead to Jesus! where the parents picking up their saintly children pulled out right in front of her or rode her bumper. Forcing herself to smile at the same competitive soccer moms who forced themselves to smile back. Measuring everything she said in the Asperger’s support group so as not to seem to be one-upping or condescending to the mothers whose kids were either more or less affected than Otis and Ava. Fixing the same unappreciated lunches; sorting the same mounds of vile sour clothes; nagging people to do their chores.

How wonderful to be in someplace totally different from Tallahassee, someplace gritty and urban and mysterious and where she wouldn’t run into anyone she knew! Her father had been the youngest of four children, but his older siblings had already passed away. None of her cousins still lived in Memphis. She had no obligations to visit anyone there. And how cool to discover that, when she and Ava visited, she actually liked the city of Memphis, found it fascinating, when she’d never appreciated it before. The wonderful old buildings downtown. The civil rights history. The place where the blues and rock and roll took off. The place where her parents had lived together for a year, and where her mother had come, as a young girl, to seek her fortune. A whole new old world lay before Caroline, waiting to be explored. She loved being a stranger in her own hometown. Because Memphis was her hometown, even though she’d lived there only until she was two.

She simply had to live in Memphis for a while. Had to.

Caroline was standing there, in Ava’s doorway, on the verge of screaming at her daughter once again, when she heard a voice behind her.

“Does she like the book?” Nance asked.

Caroline hadn’t heard the woman approach, wondered what she was doing at this end of the house.

“I was looking for the little girls’ room,” Nance said, laying a hand on her elbow. “Your daddy fell asleep.”

Ava, hearing a voice other than her mother’s bothersome one, glanced up and smiled her brilliant smile.

Caroline felt something inside her settle a little. All she wanted was for Ava to be happy. And to have her own place in the world. Well, that wasn’t all she wanted. She herself wanted to wander free in Memphis, tethered, only lightly, to Ava.

“Thanks for the book,” Ava said to Nance.

“It was very nice of you,” Caroline said to Nance. Then she turned to Ava. “But right now you need to put it down and study for your algebra test.”

“Just let me finish this,” Ava said.

It was one thing to be ignored when she was alone, and another to be ignored in front of an audience. She wanted her could-be mother to see that she’d become a good parent in spite of being abandoned as a baby. “You need to do it now,” Caroline told Ava in her stern voice.

“Okay!” Ava hurled the book across the room. It slammed into her bookcase and landed, open and pages folded, on the floor.

“I’m sorry,” Caroline said to Nance. She walked over to the book, picked it up, smoothed the pages, wanting to howl and gnash her teeth and laugh at the same time. “Ava doesn’t like math. Her tutor is on vacation.”

“It doesn’t make any sense!” Ava said. “Who cares what X equals?”

Caroline agreed but knew better than to say so.

“I used to teach algebra,” Nance said from the doorway. “Many moons ago. How about if I help you study?”

Ava didn’t say anything, but her relaxed face told Caroline what she needed to know.

Caroline sat down on the carpet, clutching the Elvis book, which was shaped like a phonograph album. It was a bit strange that Nance would volunteer to tutor Ava—unless Ava actually was her long-lost grandchild. Either way, if it made things easier on Ava—and Caroline—and if it helped Ava pass algebra so she could get into Rhodes, then why would she say no? She’d see that they studied here, so how much trouble could they get in? “We’d pay you what we pay Laura,” Caroline said.

“Oh, no,” Nance said. “Just leave us alone for an hour and I double-dog guarantee she’ll do fine on that exam.”

“It’s only a couple of days away,” Ava said, sliding to the edge of her bed.

“Let’s not get our hopes up too high,” Caroline said, but for the second time that morning Nance—Mrs. Archer, Mary, Mom, whoever she was—had caused her to feel lighter, less burdened; and as she sat there cross-legged on the floor, she could almost feel herself levitating, like those transcendental meditation people in Fairfield, Iowa, who claimed they could fly.

* * *

On the following Saturday, Caroline and her father and Nance worked in the yard. Caroline and Vic’s property had been landscaped and well tended by the previous owner, so all Caroline’s family had to do was maintain it. The backyard didn’t take much work, being mostly ferns and monkey grass and English ivy shaded by live oak trees, so they usually focused on the front yard.

Nance, dressed in bleach-spattered Bermuda shorts and a big straw hat, waded into the English ivy and commenced weeding the Nandina, a nasty exotic bamboo that tried to take over, and Caroline’s dad, covered from head to toe to prevent skin cancer and bug bites, got to work near Nance, planting some bulbs near the prickly holly bushes in front of the house. The bulbs, which Nance had brought with her, were daffodil bulbs and wouldn’t survive in Florida, she informed Caroline, unless Caroline dug them up every winter and stored them in the freezer until spring, which she wasn’t about to do, though she didn’t say so.

Caroline supposed that what Nance might’ve wanted when she’d invited herself over today was to spend time with Wilson, try to get him to remember her. It was odd, but Nance didn’t seem particularly interested in getting acquainted with Caroline, her long-lost child. Surely she must care about Caroline, the way she’d talked wistfully about missing her only daughter. But maybe Nance could focus on only one person at a time, and she’d decided to start with Wilson. Caroline told herself she was fine with that. She could wait until Nance was ready to be honest with her. That is, if the woman even was her mother and she wasn’t just having paranoid delusions.

Right now she wanted to lose herself in yard work, which gave her immediate gratification. She forgot about Wilson and Nance while she mowed the front lawn. The cycle of summer soakings had recently started up again, and the lawn, newly fertilized, had turned a lush dark green—no brown spots or orange fungus yet. After the lawn she edged and blew the brick walk and driveway off with the leaf blower—tasks she’d recently taken over from Vic because he was always off at Suzi’s soccer games on the weekends. And just like with running, she could get some of her frustration out this way.

When she was up on a ladder with Vic’s electric trimmer, attacking the front hedge—Florida anise—inhaling the rich licorice scent, someone snuck up behind her and grabbed her calf. “Boo!”

The ladder swayed and Caroline’s stomach lurched. She turned the trimmer off. “My God,” she said, shaking free of Nance’s gloved talon. “Be careful. This thing could slice us up.”

Nance tipped her straw hat back on her head. Her face was coated with a sunscreen containing zinc oxide which turned her complexion chalky white. She looked like she’d escaped from The Mikado. She gazed up at Caroline. “I believe I’m done weeding for now,” she said. “You have a hand trimmer in that little shed back there?”

Caroline explained that the shed had once been used to store tools, but they’d bequeathed it to Otis after they got tired of his blowing things up in the house. He was working on something in there now that had to do with smoke detectors. “I think he tells his granddad what he’s doing but not me. He doesn’t want any of us to go in that shed until he’s ready.” The hedge trimmer was getting heavy, and she was itching to turn it on again. She was itching, period. Biting things were nibbling on her legs. She swiped her forehead with her T-shirt sleeve. “Well, back to work,” she said.

But Nance leaned on the ladder. “Aren’t you proud of that Suzi?” she asked. “She’s such a dynamo.”

“I am,” Caroline said.

“And Ava could be a model. Truly. You know that show, America’s Next Top Model? She could win that.”

“Never seen it.”

“The winner gets scads of money!” Nance said. “And, believe me, she’s got what it takes.”

“Don’t tell her that,” Caroline protested. She had a horror of her daughters being caught up in the cultural obsession with looks and youthfulness, perhaps because she was fighting her own battle with it. “But you’re very nice to say so.”

“I’m not nice!” Nance protested. “That child is gorgeous! Just like her mother.”

Caroline smiled. She and Ava looked like entirely different animals. “Where’s my dad?”

“Weeding over in the side yard. I’m going on home now, hon. I’m just pooped.” Nance waved good-bye and set out for home, walking quickly for somebody who claimed to be pooped.

Caroline finished clipping the hedge, which took another fifteen minutes, and then turned the trimmer off. She glanced around the front yard, a rectangle enclosed by white picket fencing on the short sides, their one-story yellow brick house on one long side and, on the other long side, next to the street, a wire fence hidden in the hedge Caroline had just trimmed. The metal swing, where Wilson liked to sit, dangled empty from the limb of the live oak tree in the center of the yard. Parson roasted in a spot of sunlight on the front porch.

She climbed down the ladder, wondering if maybe he’d gone inside. She didn’t think her father would’ve wandered off anywhere, but with his memory getting worse, who knew?

She set down her clippers, and started calling “Dad!” like he was a missing dog. He wasn’t visible in the side yard. She strode back through the front yard and into the house, tromping down the hall in her dirty sneakers, shedding flakes of dirt and grass on the hardwood floors that she’d have to clean up later, calling for her father as she went, her actual dog, Parson Brown, on her heels. But the house—upstairs and down—was silent, and Wilson wasn’t there.

She stepped out onto the deck which overlooked the backyard, sloping gently downward, totally enclosed by trees and bamboo and viburnum. Otis’s shed, in the far corner of the yard, was always locked. She couldn’t see Wilson anywhere. She called his name a few times. “Dad! Wilson! Dad!” Nothing.

Her heart was beating fast now, painful adrenaline pumping through her like it did when one of her children had wandered off. She walked back through the house again, yelling Wilson’s name, through the front yard and then up and down their block of Friar’s Way, calling for him. There was nobody about, nobody that she could question. Should she start knocking on doors? He could be anywhere by now. Should she get in the car and start looking that way? She needed help. Vic wouldn’t answer his phone. Ava was at Asperger’s support group. Otis would be home from work soon, but she couldn’t wait for him.

She trotted back home and, in the kitchen, Parson panting beside her, called the police. She’d just finished up giving her report, fighting back panic, when Wilson and Otis, in his McDonald’s uniform, stepped in through the back door.

Wilson, red-faced under his brown safari hat, strands of his white hair pasted to his forehead, looked on the verge of heatstroke.

“Never mind,” she told the woman on the phone and hung up. “Where have you been?” Caroline removed his hat, got him situated in a chair, and made him drink a glass of water.

“Hot as hell in there,” he said.

“In where?”

“In my shed.” Otis slapped his grandfather on the shoulder as if he were a naughty little rascal. “I heard him rattling the door, trying to get out.”

“He must’ve locked himself in,” Caroline suggested. “Did you give him a key?” Wilson had been advising Otis on his current project, whatever it was. They’d been science pals for years.

“It was unlocked,” Wilson said.

Otis shook his head. “No, sir. I always keep it locked. There’s a key hidden out there, but he doesn’t know where it is. Nobody’s allowed in there but me.”

Caroline sank into a kitchen chair.

“I didn’t want to go in there,” Wilson said. “She made me.”

“Who made you?” Caroline asked, but she knew the answer.

“The padlock was locked from the outside,” Otis said. “He couldn’t have done it.”

“That woman,” Wilson said. “That strange woman. She pushed me in there and locked the door.”

Caroline found herself wanting, horribly, to giggle, the way she had when they were attempting the crossword puzzle. “Why would she do that, Dad?”

“I damn near suffocated in there. Couldn’t get the windows open.”

“He shouldn’t be in there,” Otis said to his mother in a scolding tone. “There’s dangerous chemicals in there.”

“What chemicals?”

He took a few steps away from her. “Just my stuff. I know what I’m doing. But if you’re in there, you need protection.”

“Protection,” Caroline repeated, and thought of birth control, which brought the giggles back up to the surface. She forced them down again.

“She hates me, for some reason,” Wilson said.

“She doesn’t hate you,” Caroline said. “Why would she hate you? I’m sure it was an accident. You need to go lie down for a while.”

So I can call Billie and give her an update, she finished silently.