There is more to my speech, but it is gone. The words on my little index card might as well be written in hieroglyphs. I stare at them, but nothing makes sense anymore. I can’t imagine a world where I might go to prison for years. I can’t imagine a world where my mother isn’t.

Then I remember something she told me once, the night I went to Christina’s slumber party. When you’re ready for us, we’ll be waiting on you. At that moment, I feel another presence I haven’t felt before. Or maybe one I never noticed. It’s solid as a wall, and warm to the skin. It’s a community of people who know my name, even when I don’t always remember theirs. It’s a congregation that never stopped praying for me, even when I flew from the nest. It’s friends I did not know I had, who have memories of me that I’ve pushed so far to the back of my mind, I’ve forgotten.

I hear the flow of the fountain behind me, and I think about water, how it might rise above its station as mist, flirt at being a cloud, and return as rain. Would you call that falling? Or coming home?

I don’t know how long I stand there, weeping. Adisa comes to me, her shawl open like the great black wings of a heron. She wraps me in the feathers of unconditional love. She bears me away.

—

AFTER THE CHOIR sings “Soon and Very Soon,” as the casket is carried from the church and we file out behind it; after the graveside ceremony, where the pastor speaks yet again, we reconvene at my mother’s apartment—the small space where I grew up. The church ladies have done their duty; there are giant bowls of potato salad and coleslaw and platters of fried chicken set out on pretty pink tablecloths. There are silk flowers on almost every horizontal space, and someone has thought to bring folding chairs, although there isn’t nearly enough room for everyone to sit.

I take refuge in the kitchen. I look over the stacked plates of brownies and lemon squares, and then walk to a tiny bookshelf above the sink. There’s a small black and white composition book there, and I open it, nearly brought to my knees by the spiky hills and valleys of Mama’s handwriting. Sweet potato pie, I read. Coconut dreams. Chocolate Cake to Break a Man. I smile at that last recipe—it was what I had cooked for Wesley, before he proposed, to which Mama only said, I told you so.

“Ruth,” I hear, and I turn around to find Kennedy and the other white woman she brought with her looking awkward and out of place in my mama’s kitchen.

I reach into the abyss and find my manners. “Thank you for coming. It means a lot.”

Kennedy takes a step forward. “I’d like you to meet my mother. Ava.”

The older woman holds out her hand in that southern way, like a limp fish, pressing just the tips of her fingers to the tips of mine. “My condolences. It was a lovely service.”

I nod. Really, what is there to say?

“How are you holding up?” Kennedy asks.

“I keep thinking Mama’s going to tell me to go tell Pastor Harold to use a coaster on her good coffee table.” I don’t have the words to tell her what it really feels like, seeing her with her own mother, knowing I don’t have that option. What it’s like being the balloon, when someone lets go of the string.

Kennedy glances down at the open book in my hands. “What’s that?”

“A recipe book. It’s only half finished. Mama kept telling me she was going to write down all her best ones for me, but she was always too busy cooking for someone else.” I realize how bitter I sound. “She wasted her life, slaving away for someone else. Polishing silver and cooking three meals a day and scrubbing toilets so her skin was always raw. Taking care of someone else’s baby.”

My voice breaks on that last bit. Falls off the cliff.

Kennedy’s mother, Ava, reaches into her purse. “I asked to come here today, with Kennedy,” she says. “I didn’t know your mom, but I knew someone like her. Someone I cared for very much.”

She holds out an old photo, the kind with scalloped edges. It is a picture of a Black woman wearing a maid’s uniform, holding a little girl in her arms. The girl has hair as light as snow, and her hand is pressed against her caregiver’s cheek in shocking contrast. There’s more than just duty between them. There’s pride. There’s love. “I didn’t know your mother. But, Ruth—she didn’t waste her life.”

Tears fill my eyes. I hand the photo back to Ava, and Kennedy pulls me into an embrace. Unlike the stiff hugs I remember from white women like Ms. Mina or my high school principal, this one does not feel forced, smug, inauthentic.

She lets go of me, so that we are eye to eye. “I’m sorry for your loss,” Kennedy says, and something crackles between us: a promise, a hope that when we go to trial, those same words will not cross her lips.

ON MY SIXTH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY, Micah gives me the stomach flu.