Dad and I lived alone in the house on Mulberry Street for four years. He is an electrician, Wade Pruitt, Pruitt Electric, a white Ford F-250 with a ladder rack and his name on the door in blue letters he'd painted himself when he was twenty-two, and in those four years he learned to braid my hair from a YouTube video, badly, and I learned to make six things for supper, and we got along. We got along the way two people get along in a lifeboat. Every Sunday we drove out to Grandma Ivy's for dinner, and she fed us like it was her job to put weight back on us, and in the winter, after the dishes, she'd let me sit by her at the quilt frame in the front room and push a needle through three layers of cloth until my fingertip bled.
"Small stitches," she'd say. "Smaller. You want eight to the inch, Junie. Ten if you're proud."
"How many do you do?"
"Fourteen. But I'm a show-off."
Then, when I was thirteen, Dad rewired a dental office in Richmond where Carla's sister worked as a hygienist, and her sister set them up, and a year later they got married in the backyard on Mulberry Street under a rented white tent with a dance floor that kept separating in the middle. I was a junior bridesmaid. I wore a lavender dress I did not choose and I did not cry and I did not make a scene, and Grandma Ivy sat in the second row in her church hat and held my hand through the vows so tightly her wedding ring left a dent.
Carla was not unkind to me. I want to be fair about that too. She was not one of those stepmothers in the stories who lock you in the attic. She bought me a real winter coat the first November, the kind with a hood that actually zips. She signed me up for driver's ed and drove with me on Sunday mornings in the Kroger parking lot, white-knuckled, saying, "Brake, brake, brake, okay, that's fine, you're fine." She made a chart for the chores and stuck to it and expected me to stick to it, which nobody had expected of me in four years, and some part of me was secretly relieved.
But she moved things. That was the trouble. She moved things the way some people bite their nails, without seeming to notice she was doing it. The first month she lived with us, Mom's coffee mugs went from the cabinet by the sink to