Chapter One

      In that year what I wanted most was a boyfriend. I was seventeen and had never had a date. I had the rest: breasts, hair under my arms, my period, the desire. I certainly had the desire.

      Once, when I was little and not too informed about the mechanics, my best friend and I had pretended to make love, our legs spread apart scissor-fashion, until we were crotch to crotch, one person’s sneaker under the other person’s nose. My grandmother had caught us at it. She sent Cecily home and spanked me with a wooden mixing spoon and made me sit in the pantry to say Hail Marys. There was no doubt in her mind, she said: I got such interests from my mother. Perhaps I did. However, even at that tender age, I had decided that they weren’t such bad interests to have.

      Nonetheless, I had reached seventeen with nothing more than a valentine from Wayne Carmelee and three kisses stolen by a Danish Eagle Scout under the bleachers at the county fair in Sandpoint, Idaho.

      This was a source of great personal dismay to me and not helped at all by my sister Megan, who was nine that year and always willing to confirm for me that I was just as ugly as I assumed I must be. She also suggested that I probably smelled bad to boys.

      My father told me that all I needed was patience. It was a natural thing, and you couldn’t stop nature from catching up with you. My time would come, he said. I replied that if we hadn’t moved around as much as we had, perhaps nature would have already located me.

      So, in the end, it was Mama I went to for comfort. I asked her when she first fell in love.

      ‘Hans Klaus Fischer,’ she said to me. She was scrubbing the floor in the kitchen when I found her. Down on her hands and knees on the linoleum, her hair tied up in a red bandanna, she paused and considered the question. And grinned. Reaching up on the kitchen counter for her cigarettes, she sat down again on the floor and leaned back against the counter next to the sink. She crossed her legs and balanced the ashtray on one knee. ‘That was when I was living in Dresden with Tante Elfie. You see, I wasn’t supposed to be seeing boys. I was just turned fifteen and Tante said I couldn’t go out yet. They were very strict in those days, you understand.’ She lit the cigarette and over the top of it, her eyes were smiling. We both knew that what Tante Elfie said probably never had much effect on what my mother did.

      ‘He was the baker’s son. I met him because Tante Elfie made me go after the bread every day. If she’d sent Birgitta, who knows? Perhaps I would never have met him. But Birgitta was the lazy one.

      ‘Anyhow, he was at the back of the shop each day, taking down the loaves.’ She paused and her eyes were still on me. ‘And do you think he was handsome?’

      ‘Was