Mami Lulu’s Deception

The funeral took place three days later at a small chapel just outside the city. I'd chosen everything myself—the simple pine casket, the single arrangement of mountain wildflowers I'd ordered specially from a grower in North Carolina, the old recording of Spanish guitar music that played softly as the few attendees gathered.

I'd spent those intervening days in a fog of memory and regret, drifting between arrangements and flashbacks. What kept returning to me was the day I first started understanding the truth about who Mami Lulu was and wasn't to me.

I'd been sitting on our cabin porch, methodically sanding the rough edges from a piece of wood. A car had appeared on our dirt road—unusual enough that I'd stood up, shading my eyes against the sun. The shiny black SUV looked alien against our scrubby yard, like a spaceship landing in a cornfield.

Two people emerged—a woman in clothes more formal than anything I'd ever owned and a tall man in an expensive-looking suit. The woman stared a