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for her “BMs,” which were a favorite and frequent topic of conversation.
    When I was left in Granny’s care, she often secretly dressed me up in frilly aprons and fluffy house slippers and spouted terrifying tales about my father, all ending with his burning in hell because he used the Lord’s name in vain. She would stoop down to me, nose to nose, the glint of her black, rhinestone-dotted, cat’s-eye glasses adding a twinkle to her eye, and whisper, “The crows are gonna peck your daddy’s eyes out!” I would invariably shriek with horror, which would cause her to let loose a crazy, high-pitched staccato cackle.
    Granny had a gifted ear for music and played an upright out-of-tune piano but only used the black keys, so her repertoire was limited to “When the Saints Go Marching In” and a few hymns. Her mind flitted like a drunken hummingbird, and she regaled me with allegories of death and carnage, like the time a cat crept into her infant cousin’s crib and “sucked the breath outta him.” She acted it out, playing the cat and the suffocating infant, finally falling back on the sofa in a dead heap. When I was sufficiently in a state of terror, her eyes would pop open and she would release that high-pitched cackle and waddle away, humming “Jesus Loves Me.”
    I am convinced that her parade of activity and prattle did not rely on the presence of others.
    My mother’s mother, whom I called Memo, was a Texas girl, raised without a father. When she was an infant, her father had abducted her two older sisters and brother and left for parts unknown. She met him only once, at twelve years old, when she heard tell of his whereabouts and took a train to his general store several hundred miles away. She walked in and straight up to a mustached man in an apron stocking a shelf. “I’m your daughter Mary,” she said, “and I just needed to see your face.” Then she turned heel and took the train back to her mother.
    Memo married my grandfather Sam when she was a mere fifteen years old. He was twenty-five and had fought in World War I—a man, strong-willed and solid. They moved to Cushing in the mid-1920s, and Sam operated a taxi stand in a town that didn’t support a taxi stand. Its primary purpose was to run bootleg gin during Prohibition and thereafter in the dry state of Oklahoma. Patrons called for a “pick-up” and got a “drop-off” from the trunk. Memo owned a café, which was celebrated for her homemade bread, desserts, and a visit by the gangster Pretty Boy Floyd, who flirted with her while she served him peach cobbler and coffee, after which he walked across the street and robbed the Cushing Bank. Memo said he was, indeed, pretty—and he tipped well.
    She’d rejected her generation’s idea that a woman’s place was in the home and regularly rose before dawn in preparation for her eighteen-hour day. Her challenging schedule didn’t really have any wiggle room for my unexpected mother, who was born years after a son had been raised and a daughter had been buried. There was a business to run and others already relied upon her.
    My mother was forced to be her own caretaker as soon as she was able, getting herself up and ready for school in the mornings and often not seeing her mother until suppertime, when she ate in the back room of the café before walking across the driveway to their apartment to put herself to bed.
    As a teenager, she was a beauty, with chocolate-colored hair that fell in thick, wavy ringlets around her graceful face and sorrowful mahogany eyes. Basically unchaperoned, she could have gone good girl or bad, but chose precision over defiance, becoming her own disciplinarian and homework monitor. She excelled in drama class and dreamed of becoming an actress—maybe even in New York or Hollywood.
    My father was a fiery, strikingly handsome rebel with a love of music that never