Dee was currently slumped in the minivan's passenger seat in what Lydia thought of as her Phone Posture (automobile). Her sneakers were on the dashboard. Her elbows and forearms were flat to the seat like a kangaroo's feet. She held her iPhone two inches from her nose. The seatbelt would probably decapitate her if they were in an accident.

"OMG!" Dee would text as they waited for the ambulance. "Decapd in car ax!"

Lydia thought about all those times her own mother had told her to stand up straight, stop slouching, hold the book away from her face, moisturize, wear a bra to bed, always suck in her stomach, and never hitchhike, and she wanted to slap herself for not following every single stupid piece of advice that had ever come out of the woman's mouth.

Too late for that now.

Rain started to spit onto the windshield. Lydia turned on the wipers. The rubber part of the blades skittered across the glass. Rick had told her last week to come by the station and get the wiper blades changed. He'd said the weather was looking bad, and Lydia had laughed because no one could predict the weather.

Metal scraped glass as the shredded rubber flopped in the wind.

Dee groaned. "Why didn't you get Rick to change those?"

"He said he was too busy."

Dee gave her a sideways glance.

Lydia turned up the radio, which is how she used to fix strange car noises before she dated a mechanic. She shifted in the seat, trying to get comfortable. The seatbelt insistently pushed against her gut. The plump rolls of fat reminded her of a popped can of biscuits. This morning, Rick had gently suggested that she might want to go to a meeting. Lydia had agreed this was a good idea, but she'd ended up going to Waffle House instead.

She'd told herself that she wasn't ready to share what she was feeling because she hadn't had time to process Paul Scott's death. And then she reminded herself that one of her more unsung talents was that she was really, really good at denial. Maintaining a three-hundred-dollar-a-day coke habit took a certain level of self-delusion. Then there was the short-sighted conviction that she was never to blame for the consequences of her own actions.

The addict's credo: It's always somebody else's fault.

For a while, Paul Scott had been that fault for Lydia. Her touchstone. Her mantra. "If only Paul hadn't ..." prefixed every excuse.

And then Dee had come along and Lydia had righted her life and she'd met Rick and Paul Scott had gotten shoved into the back of her mind the same way she had pushed back all the awful things that had happened during what she thought of as The Bad Years. Like the many times she'd found herself in county lock-up. Or the time she'd woken up with two skeevy guys in a Motel 8 and convinced herself that trading sex for drugs wasn't the same as doing it for money.

At the Waffle House this morning, she'd almost ignored Rick's call on her cell phone.

He had asked, "You feel like using?"

"No," she'd told him, because by then, the desire had been stifled by a tall stack of waffles. "I feel like I want to dig up Paul's body and kill him all over again."

The last time Lydia had seen Paul Scott, she was practically crawling out of her skin from withdrawal. They were in his stupid Miata that he cleaned every weekend with cloth diapers and a toothbrush. It was dark outside, almost midnight. Hall and Oates were playing on the radio. "Private Eyes." Paul was singing along. His voice was terrible, but then any noise had felt like an ice pick in her ear. He seemed to sense her discomfort. He smiled at Lydia. He leaned over and turned down the radio. And then he put his hand on her knee.

"Mom?"

Lydia looked over at her daughter. She feigned a double-take. "I'm sorry. Are you Dee? I didn't recognize you without a phone in front of your face."

Dee rolled her eyes. "You're not coming to my game because we suck, right, not because you're still mad about the permission slip?"

Lydia felt awful that her daughter could even think such a thing. "Honey, it's all about your poor performance. You're just too painful to watch."

"Okay, as long as you're sure."

"Positive. You are terrible."

"Question answered," Dee said. "But since we're being brutally honest, I have something else to tell you."

Lydia couldn't handle one more piece of bad news. She stared at the road thinking, pregnant, failing biology, gambling debts, meth habit, genital warts.

Dee said, "I don't want to be a doctor anymore."

Lydia felt her heart seize. Doctors had money. They had job security. They had 401(k)s and health insurance. "You don't have to decide anything right now."

"But, I kind of do because of the undergrad of it all." Dee slid her phone into her pocket. This was serious. "I don't want you to freak out or anything"

Lydia started to freak out. Sheep herder, farmer, actress, exotic dancer.

"I was thinking I want to be a veterinarian."

Lydia burst into tears.

"Deedus Christ," Dee mumbled.

Lydia looked out the side window. She had been fighting tears off and on all day, but this time she wasn't upset. "My dad was a vet. I wanted to be a vet, but ..." She let her voice trail off, because that's what you did when you were reminding your daughter that a felony drug conviction prevented you from being licensed in any state. "I'm proud of you, Dee. You'll be a great vet. You're so good with animals."

"Thanks." Dee waited for Lydia to blow her nose. "Also, when I go to college, I want to start using my real name."

Lydia had been expecting this, but she still felt sad. Dee was making a new start. She wanted a new name to go with it. She told her, "I went by the name 'Pepper' until I changed high schools."

"Pepper?" Dee laughed. "Like Salt-N-Pepa?"

"I wish. My dad said it came from my grandmother. The first time she looked after me, she said, 'That child has hell and pepper in her hair.'" Lydia saw this required further explanation. "I was a handful when I was a kid."

"Wow, you've really changed a lot."

Lydia poked her in the ribs. "Julia's the one who started calling me Pepper."

"Your sister?" Dee's head had turtled down her neck. Her voice sounded tentative.

"It's okay to talk about her." Lydia willed her lips to turn up into a smile, because talking about Julia was always hard. "Is there anything you want to know?"

Dee obviously wanted to know more than Lydia could tell her, but she asked, "Do you think you'll ever find her?"

"I don't know, sweetheart. It was a long time ago." Lydia rested her head in her hand. "We didn't really have DNA back then, or twenty-four-hour news cycles, or the Internet. One of the things they never found was her pager."

"What's a pager?"

"It's like text messaging, but you can only leave a phone number."

"That sounds stupid."

"Well." Maybe it sounded stupid to someone who could hold a tiny computer with access to the entire world's knowledge in her hand. "You look like her. Did you know that?"

"Julia was beautiful." Dee sounded dubious. "Like, really beautiful."

"You're really beautiful too, sweetheart."

"Whatever." Dee took out her phone, ending the conversation. She slowly sunk back into the Posture (automobile).

Lydia watched the wipers valiantly battle the rain. She was crying again, but not the humiliating, sobby cries that she'd been struggling against all morning. First Paul Scott and now Julia. Today was apparently her day to be overwhelmed by old memories. Though, admittedly, Julia was never far from Lydia's mind.

Twenty-four years ago, Julia Carroll had been a nineteen-year-old freshman at the University of Georgia. She was studying journalism, because in 1991 there was still such a thing as having a career as a journalist. Julia had gone to a bar with a group of friends. No one remembered a particular man paying closer attention to her than the others, but there must have been at least one, because that night at the bar was the last time anyone ever reported seeing Julia Carroll again.

Ever. They'd never even found her body.

This was why Lydia had raised a child who could change a flat tire in three minutes and who knew that you never, ever let an abductor take you to a second location: because Lydia had witnessed firsthand what can happen to teenage girls who are raised to think that the worst thing that can happen to them is they don't get asked to the prom.

"Mom, you missed the turn."

Lydia tapped the brakes. She checked the mirrors and backed up. A car swerved around her, horn blaring.

Dee's thumbs blurred across the bottom of her phone. "You're gonna end up killing yourself in a car accident and I'm gonna be an orphan."

Lydia had only herself to blame for this kind of hyperbole.

She drove around the school and pulled into a parking space in the back. Instead of the Valhalla that was the Westerly Intramural Sporting Complex, the gym behind Booker T. Washington High School in downtown Atlanta was a 1920s red-brick structure that more closely resembled the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

Lydia scanned the parking lot, because that's what she always did before she unlocked the doors.

"I'll get a ride home from Bella." Dee grabbed her gym bag off the back seat. "See you tonight."

"I need to go in."

Dee looked horrified by the prospect. "Mom, you said"

"I need to go to the bathroom."

Dee got out of the car. "You pee all the time."

"Thank you for that." Between thirty-two hours of labor and the looming specter of menopause, Lydia was lucky her bladder wasn't hanging between her knees like a cow's udder.

She turned around to retrieve her purse from the back seat. Lydia stayed there, making sure Dee went into the building. And then she heard the click of the driver's-side door opening. Instinctively, Lydia swung around with her fists up, screaming, "No!"

"Lydia!" Penelope Ward had her arms over her head. "It's me!"

Lydia wondered if it was too late to punch her.

Penelope said, "Gosh, I didn't mean to scare you."

"I'm fine," Lydia lied. Her heart was down by her bladder. "I was just dropping off Dee. I can't talk right now. I have a funeral to go to."

"Oh, no. Whose?"

Lydia hadn't thought that far ahead. "A friend. An old teacher. Miss Clavel." She was really talking too much. "That's all there is. There isn't any more."

"Okay, but a quick word." Penelope was still blocking the open door. "Remember how I told you about the International Festival?"

Lydia bumped the gear into reverse. "Just send me whatever recipe you want and I'll"

"Super! You'll have it by three o'clock today." Penelope was good about setting her own deadlines. "But, listen, are you still in touch with the band?"

Lydia edged her foot toward the gas.

"It jogged my memory when you said you grew up in Athens. I went to UGA."

Lydia should've guessed by the pastel sweater sets and blowjobby pucker to her lips.

"I saw you perform a zillion times. Liddie and the Spoons, right? God, those were the days. Whatever happened to those gals? Probably ended up married with a ton of kids, am I right?"

"Yep." If you mean incarcerated, divorced four times and keeping a punch card in her wallet from the Women's Health Center so she can get her tenth abortion for free. "We're all just a bunch of old ladies."

"So," Penelope was still blocking the door, "you'll ask them, right? What a kick Dee would get out of seeing her mom on stage."

"Oh, she'd be thrilled. I'll email you about it, okay?" Lydia had to get out of here with or without the minivan door intact. She eased her foot off the brake. Penelope walked alongside her. "Need to go now." Lydia motioned for her to get out of the way. "Need to close the door." She tapped her foot on the gas.

Finally, Penelope stepped back so she wouldn't get knocked down. "I look forward to receiving your email!"

Lydia hit the gas so hard that the minivan lurched. God, this really was her day to have her shitty past dredged up and thrown like a pile of steaming cow manure at her feet. She'd love to get Penelope Ward and the band together. They would eat her alive. Literally. The last time the Spoons had been in the same room together, two of them ended up in the hospital with severe bite marks.

Was that the first time Lydia had been arrested? It was definitely the first time her father had bailed her out of jail. Sam Carroll had been equal parts mortified and heartbroken. Of course, at that point in his life, there were very few pieces of his heart left that were big enough to shatter. Julia had been gone for five years by then. Her father had had five years of sleepless nights. Five years of suspended grief. Five years of filling his head with all the terrible things that might have been done to his eldest daughter.

"Daddy," Lydia sighed. She wished that he had lived long enough to see Lydia straightened out. She really wished that he'd met Dee. He would've loved her dry sense of humor. And maybe knowing Dee, holding his granddaughter in his arms, would've kept his poor, broken heart beating a few more years.

Lydia stopped at a red light. There was a McDonald's on the right. Lydia still needed to go to the bathroom, but she knew if she went inside, she'd order everything on the menu. She stared at the light until it turned. Her foot went to the gas.

Fifteen more minutes passed before she pulled into the Magnolia Hills Memorial Gardens. She'd told Penelope Ward that she was going to a funeral, but she felt more like she was going to a birthday party. Her birthday party. The Lydia who didn't have to worry about Paul Scott anymore was officially four days old.

She should've brought a hat.

The rain picked up as soon as Lydia stepped out of the van. She popped open the back and found an umbrella that would open. The hem of her dress wicked up rainwater. She scanned the cemetery, which was gardenlike and hilly with lots of magnolias, just as advertised. She pulled a sheet of paper out of her purse. Lydia loved the Internet. She could Google Earth the Mothers' houses, look up how much they'd paid for their idiotic designer outfits, and, more important to today's task, print out a map leading to Paul Scott's gravesite.

The walk was longer than she had anticipated, and of course the rain got worse the farther she got from her van. After ten minutes of following what turned out to be a very inaccurate map, Lydia realized she was lost. She took out her phone and Googled the information again. Then she tried to map her location. The flashing blue dot said she needed to go to the north. Lydia turned north. She walked a few feet and the blue dot indicated she needed to go south.

"For fucksakes," Lydia mumbled, but then her eye caught a headstone two rows over.

SCOTT.

Paul had grown up just outside of Athens, but his father's people were from Atlanta. His parents were buried alongside Scotts going back several generations. He had once told Lydia that Scotts had even fought on both sides of the Civil War.

So, he came by his duplicity honestly.

Paul's grave had a tiny marker that looked more like a stake you'd use to label a vegetable garden. Sugar Snap Peas. Cabbage. Sadistic Prick.

Lydia supposed his headstone had been ordered. Something large and garish made of the finest marble and phallic-shaped because being dead didn't stop you from being a dick.

Last night while Lydia was watching TV with Rick, she had zoned out, picturing herself standing by Paul's grave. She hadn't anticipated the rain, so in her mind, the sun was happily shining in the sky and bluebirds sat on her shoulder. Likewise, she had never considered the freshly dug red Georgia clay would be covered by Astroturf. The fake grass was the kind of thing you saw at a putt-putt course or on the balcony of a cheap motel. Paul would've hated it, which is why she couldn't help smiling.