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  The blizzard of ’49 kept the whole county home, and Jane sat restless at her window, watching the snowflakes careen past like little dancers as her music box accompanied them, popping out the tinny notes of “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic.” The house was quiet, aside from the music box’s song; four of Jane’s brothers had married local girls, and the other two had taken an apartment together downtown. The snow surrounded the small farmhouse like a heavy quilt, insulating Jane from the world beyond.

  The last flake had barely fallen when the announcements began. Jane, apparently, had been the only one facing the cold alone. Billy and Franklin were both expecting little bundles, and Arzella was overjoyed. It had been too long since she’d held a squalling baby to her chest and comforted it, she said.

  “Of course, you’ll be our go-to babysitter,” Billy said.

  “Aunt Jane!” Franklin declared.

  The title filled Jane with bubbling giddiness. “Aunt Jane,” she repeated. Suddenly she had an outlet for all the love she’d been holding deep within her chest. Every evening after work, she knitted hats and sweaters, blankets and socks. The clack of her needles became a rhythm to hum along to—sometimes jazz tunes, and at others, old hymns.

  “And then there was the letter from Ding.”

  “What letter?” Cassidy asked.

  Among the advertisements, a lunch invitation for Arzella, and the latest Sears catalog had been a letter postmarked from Arlington, Virginia. Jane tore into the envelope and extracted the peach stationary.

  Dear Jane, she read. I hope you are doing well back at home. Jane’s stomach clenched at this and she crossed her legs. Ding had not been “home” in half a decade. Could she even call it that anymore?

  I’m writing to tell you that little Harry has contracted polio. Oh, Jane. I am terribly afraid. I fear in my heart, though I can’t tell Cal, of course, that he won’t recover, and I don’t know what I’ll do. I miss you something awful, cousin. I need you, the way I used to. Please write back as soon as you can. I am doing nothing but wringing my hands and missing you.

  Jane placed the letter in her lap and put a hand to her mouth, her whole body convulsing with cries. As she wept, a hot throb arose in her index finger. From the corner of her eye, Jane saw a red globe of blood squeezing from a small straight cut. Just as Jane brought her finger to her lips, the phone rang out. Jane tasted iron and earth, and knew, of course, that it would be Ding.

  “That’s terrible,” Cassidy breathed.

  “Yes, it was awful.” Jane realized she should not have told such a story to a pregnant woman. “But that’s why I stayed. I had work here and people who needed me.” This, too, was the wrong thing to say, and Jane again felt guilty instantly. “But you go on now. Get back to your life there. I know you’re busy, darling. I love you.” She hung up before Cassidy could protest, and pulled the awful blanket around her arms. To her own surprise, she was able to sleep.

  Cassidy

  When the Accord returned the next day, Cassidy tried to force herself to stay put in her room rather than greet her girlfriend at the door. She had a girlfriend. In real life. And she was here. Cassidy threw her phone, which she’d been using to go back and forth between real estate listings and old pictures of said girlfriend, on the nightstand. She walked to the door, then made herself turn around and get back on the bed. She opened the as-yet-untouched childbirth book to a random page and waited for Noeli to come in.

  “Oh, hi,” she said as her girlfriend stepped into the room.

  Noeli kissed her on the cheek. “Did you talk to your mom today?”

  “I did! And look what I found!” Cassidy gave up pretending to read the book, letting it fall to the floor. She showed Noeli the latest house she’d bookmarked. “It’s only nine hundred square feet, but it’s not like we need a ton of space. It’s walking distance to downtown. I’m imagining us walking all the time with the baby. Look at those floors! It was built in 1908!” She looked at Noeli, who was frowning. “What?”

  “It’s in Redlands.”

  “I really loved it when we drove around. The houses and the downtown. I can really imagine feeling settled there. It seems like the perfect place to have a family.”

  “A white family.” Cassidy froze and Noeli sighed. “Redlands is adorable, but it’s a bunch of rich white liberals. They’re always voting down affordable housing measures because they want to keep their city’s ‘charm.’”

  “But we could afford this one. The money from the farm is enough for a down payment where our mortgage wouldn’t be bad.”

  “That’s not the point,” Noeli said. “They don’t want brown people there. That’s what they think makes their city charming. What they think distinguishes it from San Bernardino.”

  “Isn’t it more about the crime rate? And the better schools? I looked at a few houses in San Bernardino, but—”

  Noeli cut her off. “And you think crime rate and good schools is a separate issue from poverty and race?”

  “No, but—” Cassidy felt defensive.

  “I don’t want to live somewhere that doesn’t want me. Or only wants me if I’m with a nice, respectable white girl and have enough money. San Bernardino has groups doing real community organizing. Redlands has people raising money for their summer concert series.”

  Cassidy had read about the summer concert series. She’d thought it sounded nice. “San Bernardino just seems like a bigger Fontana when we’ve driven through. I don’t want to live somewhere that feels like another shitty suburb. I want to feel like it’s somewhere I chose.”

  “I’m sure you do.” Noeli rolled her eyes. “Somewhere ‘charming.’”

  “I think if I’m buying you a house, I should get to say I want it somewhere nice.”

  The women shut their mouths in shock as the air seemed to leave the room. For a moment they stayed silent, contemplating the direction this would go. There seemed, still, to be a chance they could laugh it off, apologize, lie back and play with filters together on one of their phones. The moment passed and Noeli’s face hardened. “Buying me a house!” she snorted. “So you think I’m what? Using you? Do you remember that you brought this up? Every single bit of it? And that I took you into my house, pregnant, without wanting anything from you?”

  “This isn’t about you using me. You’re putting words in my mouth. This is about you pushing me to spend my family’s money on a boring box of a house where we’re going to get stabbed walking around.” It was about more than that now, though, but there was no way for Cassidy to say this. In that silent moment, Noeli had flipped a switch, throwing up a wall between them. She had closed herself off. The angle of her eyebrows and the rhythm of her head movements mimicked Rosa’s, and Cassidy realized that Noeli had avoided becoming her mother simply by circumstance.

  No. Noeli was not Rosa. She was Noeli. Cassidy’s Noeli. Cassidy took a deep breath and tried to cross the distance between them. “This is the land I grew up on, and we’re talking about selling it for something that doesn’t feel right to me. I don’t know how to explain what a big deal that is.”

  “Because I wouldn’t get it? Because we’re immigrants? Because we don’t have land that’s been in the family for generations?”

  “No, you’re right. I’m sorry. You should get it more.”

  “I should, shouldn’t I? But I don’t because I’ll never be as smart as Cassidy. Cassidy didn’t go to a community college—she went to a university,” she jeered.

  “I didn’t mean it like—” The bedspread felt scratchy under her fingers.

  “Cassidy makes better hipster jokes than anyone. Cassidy is tortured, but it’s endearing. Cassidy doesn’t get in trouble, and even if she does, it magically falls back into place because that’s how it is for women like Cassidy. It must be really fucking nice.”

  “Women like me?” Anger rose in Cassidy’s throat like stomach acid.
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  “Yes. White women. You don’t get to pretend you’re not white because you grew up in West Virginia.”

  “I never . . . all I ever said about that was that I grew up without a lot of money. That I understand class struggles, and it’s different in a place where there aren’t a lot of people of color. Especially being Jewish.”

  Had Noeli been harboring all of this? What else did she hate about Cassidy?

  “Being poor is different in a place where you have your own house and plenty of food and you know it.”

  “I know it’s different. That doesn’t mean it’s—”

  Noeli had collected everything Cassidy said and did and saved it for when she needed it. Even when Cassidy had thought they were friends, she was gathering resentments like eggs, waiting to break them over her head.

  “We talk about your feelings constantly,” Noeli said. “And you barely ask me how my day was. Of course it’s only your feelings that matter if we’re making a big decision.”

  “That isn’t true,” Cassidy protested. She frantically tried to replay their conversations, searching for moments that contradicted this assertion of her terribleness.

  “It is true, Cass.” Her use of the nickname conveyed exasperation rather than endearment. “But you don’t realize it because you don’t even think to talk about me. Speaking of which, you know how camming makes you feel so ‘empowered’? You get to feel that way because you’re white and you’re making the choice to do it. You get to choose the parameters and only do things you’re comfortable with. It’s not like that for everyone.”

  “I know that,” Cassidy said. “I know it’s a privilege to be empowered by it. You know I’m in that advocacy group for sex workers—” Shame churned within her, swirling with embarrassment and anger.

  “That’s another thing.” Noeli cut her off again. “You love being a sex worker the same way you love talking about how you grew up poor because it makes you sound so oppressed and cool. You know I could go over to Lupe’s right now.” Noeli’s words were ice picks poking Cassidy. Cassidy saw a look of horror in Noeli’s eyes, like she simultaneously hated what she was doing and delighted in it. “It would be easy. I could drive over to her condo and knock on her door and she would let me in and we’d argue for a couple minutes and then we would fuck. And it would be easy because she gets being Latina and she gets being a lesbian who’s out and she gets how to interact with other humans like they also have feelings.”

  Cassidy winced, picturing Noeli with Lupe, imagining the names they would call her, knowing they would be right.

  “Mostly though . . .” Noeli was looking at the ceiling now and shaking her head. “Mostly, she doesn’t have so much shit going on!” Noeli screamed the last few words and leapt from the bed. As she walked out of the room and into the hallway, the rubber soles of her Chucks thudded rhythmically—thump, thump, thump toward the kitchen. Cassidy watched Noeli’s curls bobbing as she went.

  Cassidy sat, stunned, and put a hand to her belly. The baby turned, the hard edge of its foot moving across her abdomen in an arc from right to left, pausing at her belly button like it was tracing the line of the equator on a globe.

  Thump, thump, thump. Noeli’s Chucks came back up the hall, and Cassidy nearly cried in relief. The thumps thumped right past Cassidy’s door, though, with a blur of dark curls, and Cassidy heard the door across the hall open and then close, then moments later the fuzzy sounds of riot grrrl from laptop speakers.

  Cassidy picked up her phone, which was still open to the beautiful craftsman in South Redlands, with its cute blue pillars and yellow trim, the sunflowers growing in the front yard. The colors blurred together with her tears. She exited the real estate website and went to her contacts, blinking hard as the phone rang.

  “Mom,” she said when Paloma answered. “I need to come home.”

  Paloma

  It took several seconds for Paloma to register what her daughter was saying. She’d been sure Cassidy would stay in California no matter what. Cassidy never admitted to her mistakes. She hated to be vulnerable. She’d been stubborn her whole life.

  Paloma remembered a night when Cassidy was three or four. The sun had begun to set, the swings and slides fading into silhouettes in the dusk.

  “Daddy! Fireflies!” Cassidy exclaimed as yellow bulbs blinked around them.

  “Catch one!” Ken said. It took Cassidy a few tries, but eventually she managed to enclose one of the glowing creatures between her cupped palms.

  “Now let it go,” Paloma said.

  “Nuh-uh.”

  Cassidy felt strangely unfamiliar to Paloma sometimes—this child she’d grown within her body, fed from her breast. Watching her in the dark, Paloma thought she looked like a miniature Jane. Where Paloma’s hair was thick and brittle, Cassidy’s was sleek and wavy. Where Paloma’s long legs seemed to feed directly into her torso, Cassidy’s child body was already rounding into a small bell. Paloma wondered if she had simply been a vessel to bring Ken’s baby into the world. This flash of a thought disturbed her. No, she told herself. Cassidy was hers. She knew her like she knew her own limbs.

  “Cassidy, wild things want to be free. You can enjoy it for a while, say thank you, and then let it go.”

  “It’s my friend,” Cassidy insisted. “I named her Amy, and she wants to be with me.”

  A bullfrog croaked in the pond. The crickets thrummed. Paloma and Ken walked back toward the house, Cassidy following behind. Inside, Cassidy’s small murmurings continued until the insect’s glow had faded to a pale yellow dot. “Let it out, Cassidy. Please. It’s dying,” Paloma said as they stood by the coatrack.

  “It’s not dying. It’s sleeping,” Cassidy said, her small face screwed up in anger at her mother. “She wants to sleep in my room.”

  Paloma could not know then how at twelve Cassidy would refuse her help with homework because she thought it was cheating, instead preferring to get an answer wrong, but she could sense that same unyielding sense of righteousness. She could not know that at twenty Cassidy would stop eating meat, or how at twenty-four she would get naked on camera for strangers because she preferred it to the indignity of driving for a rideshare service. She could not know these things, but still she could picture the obstinate, dogged core of Cassidy that led to each of these decisions. Paloma imagined it as a small glowing stone somewhere deep within her daughter.

  Neither could Paloma have conceived then of the possibility that each of these choices, in their own way, might be right for Cassidy. Instead, as Cassidy placed the dying insect at her bedside and changed into the large Mickey Mouse T-shirt she wore as a nightgown, Paloma thought, My daughter’s stubbornness will be an obstacle for her.

  Paloma returned to the room thirty minutes later, when Cassidy had fallen asleep, her long eyelashes splayed down her smooth cheeks. This was when Cassidy felt the most like hers. Paloma put a hand on her belly and felt it rise and fall with each breath, as it had since she was a tiny baby. She kissed her sleeping daughter on the forehead and breathed in the warm scent of her hair, then lifted the firefly gently and took it outside, blowing it from her palm into the long grass behind the house.

  In the morning, Cassidy awoke, frantic. “Where’s Amy?” she demanded. Her little fists were balled at her sides.

  “She must have flown away in the night.” Paloma shrugged and dunked her tea bag. Cassidy looked at her mother, skeptical and angry.

  Cassidy had come upon her stubbornness honestly, Paloma thought in the years that followed, as she beseeched Ken to put aside his pet projects. “You have to build the house. A real one.”

  Ken looked up from his seat on the floor and the tepee he was constructing. “I was thinking of trying to sell these,” he said. “Feel this.” He held an animal hide out to Paloma.

  “A real house,” she said, and though the thick white skin looked inviting, she did not reach out for
it.

  Ken put the hide in his lap and leaned back on his hands. “We’ll get to it. How much do you think these could sell for?”

  Far away, towers came down, and everywhere, flags went up. In Buckhannon, the stars and stripes often waved next to the Confederate banner and Paloma knew her neighbors’ unity did not include her. She watched as Cassidy grew into a feral, wild thing, more and more independent. Her daughter roamed the woods, scattering yarn scraps and spotting them later in songbird nests. She sucked the pink-white fingers of clover flowers. She was native to this place in a way Paloma would never be.

  “I don’t need you to follow me, Mommy,” Cassidy said one afternoon.

  Thinking about the comment, Paloma was struck, to her horror, with resentment. How many hours had she spent braiding Cassidy’s hair? Would her other babies have wanted her more? Why was Cassidy the one who was born, who “chose to come earthside”?

  “Of course you don’t.” Paloma smiled and watched as Cassidy flew down Shumaker Hill on her purple Huffy bike, her two braids flying out behind her in the wind, leaving Paloma alone at the top.

  Ken came home late that evening. “I’ll put her to bed,” he told Paloma. “You’ve had a long day.”

  “You’ve been at work all day. It’s all right.” Idleness made Paloma feel guilty, as if she did not deserve her daughter.

  “I don’t mind. Let’s go, sweet pea.” He patted Cassidy on the back. “Bedtime.”

  In the kitchen, Paloma sat before a cup of chamomile tea and listened to the muffled sounds of Ken and Cassidy talking and laughing. They didn’t need her, either of them. She’d merely been a means for them to get to each other. She could disappear and they’d be fine. She took a sip of tea. She’d let it steep too long and it tasted bitter.

  An hour later Cassidy awoke crying and Paloma rushed to her side, Cabbage Patch dolls pouting in the light from glow-in-the-dark star decals. “I don’t feel good, Mommy.” Cassidy’s hair was plastered to her sweaty cheeks.