Prologue

      “This is my first diary, and I don’t know exactly where to start. Mama always kept one, but I never did. She told me to read hers after she was gone so I would understand, but her personal things were packed away and I couldn’t get to them for a long time.

      “My name is Cynthia Danbury. I am fourteen and a half years old.”

      Fourteen and a half. Ten years ago. How very young I was then, she mused now.

      “I’m called Cindy, which probably should be spelled Sendy because people are always sending me on errands. In case anyone ever reads this, I want it on record that Daddy was an inventor. He died before he could invent anything important that people would pay money for, but that didn’t mean he never amounted to anything. Mama worked real hard at the truck stop to earn money for Daddy’s experiments. She was not a worthless shantytown tramp who ruined a perfectly decent boy, like Aunt Stephenson told Uncle Henry she was, which is one of the reasons I’m writing this. To set the record straight.”

      Looking back, Cindy could remember as if it were yesterday the first time she’d met her aunt Stephenson, her father’s sister. Cindy had been about seven years old. They had just moved to Mocksville. Her father had taken her to a large white house, with a wide porch and stained glass panels beside the front door, to meet her aunt Lorna.

      They’d been standing in the front hall, only now it was called a foyer. Her father had introduced her to a large woman in a black silk dress and told Cindy that this was her “Aunt Lorna.”

      “You may call me Mrs. Stephenson,” the woman had corrected coldly. Her father had been furious. Cindy remembered hiding behind him and clinging to his hand. Over the years they had reached a compromise, she and her father’s sister. Cindy called her Aunt S.

      Picking up the diary again, she skipped a few pages and continued to read. “Mama never went with us when we visited. I didn’t understand why until years later, when I read her diary a long time after the accident.

      “The accident was when Daddy and I were taking Mama to work, and this tank truck blew a tire and ran us off the road. Daddy was killed instantly. My hip was damaged. A nurse said it was crushed, but if that had been the case I’d have had to have a new one, and I didn’t. Just a patch job.

      “Anyway, Mama and I were both in the hospital and couldn’t even go to Daddy’s funeral. Aunt S. saw to everything, and I guess I’m grateful, but I resent it, too. I don’t like to think about those days, so mostly I don’t.”

      Cindy’s hip never had healed properly. She still limped when she was tired, but the scar was barely visible. She’d been about eleven then. It had happened in November. She could remember starting her period the next May and thinking it had something to do with her hip, until her mother explained.

      “Mama was surprised I didn’t already know, and I guess I sort of did. They teach all about it in school, only it’s different when it actually happens to you. Besides, whenever I have to listen to embarrassing stuff, I design hats in my mind. Big, fancy hats. The romantic kind with lots of nice floppy flowers.”

      Yes, and she still did, only now she did more than merely design them in her mind. Skimming a few more pages, Cindy marveled at how naive she’d been ten years earlier.

      “Who I Am. In case I have children of my own one day and they need to know about their lina—lineage, I can’t really help with it very much. I do know Mama’s folks, the Scarboroughs, came from out near the coast somewhere, and there aren’t any left closer than third cousin, once removed. But maybe this will be a starting place.

      “Mama was real sad after Daddy died, and when she didn’t get over it, it turned out that she had leukemia. I stayed with a neighbor while she was in the hospital, and when I’d visit her she tried to pretend everything was going to be all right, but we both knew better.

      “Those were really bad times. I remember we played double sol and watched silly cartoons on TV. Sometimes we just sat and held hands. Once we laughed together over what she called my tacky taste, and she said I must have inherited it from her because we both liked big, gaudy hats with tons of fake flowers.”

      Cindy reached for the framed photograph on her bedside table, an out-of-focus snapshot of a very young woman wearing bell-bottom pants, a halter, a floppy-brimmed hat trimmed with sunflowers, and a broad, happy smile. Mama at age nineteen, holding her precious old Gibson guitar.

      “I’m not going to talk about all that because it still hurts too much, but if anyone ever reads this, I want you to know that Aurelia Scarborough Danbury was the sweetest, bravest woman in the world. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

      “Anyway, after Mama died I went to live with Aunt Stephenson and Uncle Henry and my stepcousins, Maura and Stephanie, because in a town like ours, where everybody knows everybody’s family all the way back to Year One, even when some of them live in big fancy houses like Aunt S. does and some live in trailer parks like we did, the whole town knows who’s kin to who. (Or as Aunt S. would say, whom.) So when the social services lady said if the Stephensons wouldn’t take me in they’d have to find me a foster home, poor Aunt S. didn’t have much choice. I guess she could’ve explained, but people would still have talked, and Nice People don’t get themselves talked about, according to Aunt S.

      “Uncle Henry was more like family than Aunt S. Actually, neither of them was real family, but you know what I mean. He used to call me Radish on account of my hair, and give me a box of chocolates and a twenty-dollar bill every Christmas. I saved half the money for the Future and spent the rest on gifts, but the candy never lasted through the holidays. Steff and Maura both have a sweet tooth.

      “I didn’t really want to live there, but I didn’t know what else to do, and anyway, when you’re only twelve and a half, people don’t listen to you. But I sort of liked Maura and Steff. Maura is two years