When she’s thick in her loss, Mama's only solution is to fix her eyes to heaven and begin praying the heavy syllable words that sprinkled Josie's childhood so often. Thick words rooted in languages Josie couldn't understand. Stories of snakes and charms and purgatory. The ceiling in the kitchen is trimmed with the crux of early dawn light. Mama's beauty – honey eyes and her sharp tongue – is the kind of beauty that gets in the way of believing. For the entire twenty years of her life, Josie's mother has sat vigil in her rocking chair, metabolizing what she's witnessed, processing her victimhood, whispering in muted tongues for the Holy Spirit to set her free. Lina needs summertime revivals, needs the comfort of twilight and the possibility of dawn. As she prays, she cuts her eyes at Josephine. Words skip through the gap between her lips before spiraling into hysterics, shouting that Josie can't abandon her. Lina's voice is gravel, her gaze flint. She volleys empty threats at her only daughter. Willing her not to leave. She demands Josephine's allegiance, her roots, her permanence. Lina doesn't understand there's nowhere for Josie to go.

"There's nothing for you in heaven if you spend all your fun here," she tells her daughter. "Nothing for you on the outside either. Your place is right here." 

Lina has been spinning Josie tighter and tighter for thousands of days, each time retelling her decision to keep the baby, to carry to term. Not like Edith and that adoption, or Hazel with her herbs and coat hangers. Lina chose right, chose what her god would want her to do. Every retelling, the choice becomes more magnificent and impacting, monumental. Josie falls for it every single time. 

Her mother, her life. This morning, Lina's been at it again, taunting Josie, calling her a bastard, a woman with no father. Mama's presence grows when she bullies. Josie leans against the kitchen doorframe, her bare feet making galaxies in the cat hair on the ground. She tries to look past her mama and her prayers, the rocking chair stuck in the front bay window for decades. 

Confetti memories of Viron Coe pinwheel like marionettes, pretty on the outside, hollow everywhere else. Josephine's father, her own name taken from one of his distant relatives. Lina lives in the memories of their brief courtship, all flowers, and splashes, juniper, and vanilla. Sparking bodies and their snaking legs, her mouth open, gaping, swallowing the past and swallowing Viron with it. Night becomes soup as Lina stares out the window, the waning moon wavering between curtained windows. Twenty years ago, she was sure there would be no tomorrow, so she didn't reply to the note he left on her car windshield, driver's side, tied with twine around sprigs of rosemary, lavender, mint, herbs from his mother's garden. Spun fragments of if-onlys reach back from the sun and speed and thrill of someone loving her, saccharine smiles steeped in the fear of her lord. 

Bracing and exhilarating with a touch of pine, Lina was the gin to Viron's tonic, before she said no, before he left, for the still hidden up the road, before he buried his gold and named two collies Red, before he slowly decayed, decade by decade, until twenty years on, the only thing that reminded of that piney smell was something a touch vicious and a bit sappy, like the berries harvested from small shrub trees. Viron, the kind breaker of oaths who would appear on Sundays with a pocket bottle of rye and fistful of fruits, his other hand clutching a blanket – courting in Oneida. She let him woo her, let Viron pull her from her small-print, orange covered Bible, and her Sunday school class. Lina needed flowers in his kisses, not leftover rage in his bruises. It isn't easy for Lina to keep up the pretense but if she weren't hiding this secret, she'd find something else to hide. 

Their house faces a back-alley access road where three trashcans without lids invariably become overfull every single week. Occasionally, random bits of mail get deposited into the leaning dented mailbox, their surprise arrivals speaking around the coarse edges of Josie's life. Lina's gaze has returned to the window, watching the Morse code of oak leaves sway in the late summer wind. 

From the alley, an orchestra of barking staccato signals that the letter carrier is approaching. Josie's heart bleats, a blip of longing that she tries to tamp down.  She moves faster than light, faster than the sounds of Michael's admonishments and threats. Nestled amid Vinny's Value For Less Dress Shop, an advertisement Lina could have been in decades ago, between the most recent edition of Guidepost, a small postcard addressed to someone halfway across town. Someone, Josie imagines, who knows that there's more to the earth than her mama's house, more to her life than her mama's insults. The thin card, faded from the sun, vintage and new at the same time. Galactic landscape dotted periwinkle, violet, heliotrope. Twinkles of stars as alive as in the sky shimmer in the sun. Josephine holds her breath, examining the plum and amaranthine, imagining a wide-open universe with room to explore. She tucks the postcard in between the waistband of her shorts, walks casually around to the front of the house, and looks through the glass at her mother. 

Lina's face, arranged somewhere between distress and relief, lightly reflects against the mid-century glass. The same cool eyes, no matter the season, a thin line in place of that saccharine smile. In a county of starts, where promises between families were made by staring into forest patches and into the voice, the love of Lina and Viron helped shape history. She called their first kiss a miracle, colorful lilies plucked from the top of a deep green mountain. Josie looks through her mother, past the hate and the touch of something bitter, her mother who clawed her way through revelations, unwilling to let her daughter blossom.