My mother is so much of me, I can’t tell where she leaves off and I begin. I am too much a baby that way and old enough to know it, but nothing fastens me to the world like the clasp of my mother’s cool fingers around my small clammy hand. I will not wail and stamp my feet in their frilly nylon anklets and black, patent-leather Mary Janes. My mother’s tongue clucks at little girls who throw fits. I prefer to delight her if I can. I get to spend one day with her. Don’t ruin it, Aunt Irene has warned me. Marie has enough worries, she said. Before my mother left me with Aunt Irene, I had never spent a night away from her. I don’t know how many weeks she’s been with my brother at Baptist Hospital in Nashville. My brother is sixteen. I am five. I’m the baby. Aunt Irene says he needs my mother more than I do. I don’t believe it. It’s a hundred miles from Nashville to our farm near Waynesboro, farther to Aunt Irene’s farm on Eagle Creek. My daddy has been at t
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