An hour later I had gathered up all of my dirty clothes, my generic laundry soap, and another one of my books—Pride and Prejudice. The cover was new and featured a Hollywood actress. The one that was all chin and cheekbones.

My dog-eared and beloved copy from high school English class had been burned in the burn pile.

The laundry was on the other side of the rhododendron with the families, where the trailers were packed in a little tighter. But most of the trailers were in really good shape and a few families had worked hard to make them look homey with scrappy flower gardens, and a few of the little wooden decks were hung with twinkle lights.

Or maybe those were just Christmas decorations that never came down.

The trailer right next to the laundry was one of the few double-wides. And there were balloons tied to the door. Birthday streamers across the back of the trailer.

A line of kids screamed around the corner of the trailer, five in all; a few of them I recognized from that day at the grocery store. Danny was there. The others were strangers. But they all had face paint on. There were two pirates. A tiger and a Spider-Man.

I sidestepped the kids and flattened myself against the aluminum siding of the laundry.

“Boys!” The mom, the woman from the grocery store, came out of the trailer, carrying a little tray of paint and a paintbrush in her hand. Two little girls clung to the long, colorful dress she wore. One daughter had a rainbow across her forehead. The other, in diapers, had half a sun. “Boys, take it over to the playground. We’re going to have cake in a half hour!”

The boys switched direction on a dime and raced over to the swing set and slide that were set up across the dirt road.

The mom turned to go back inside and I wished I could somehow vanish before she saw me, but no such luck.

“Hey,” she said, looking as awkward as I felt. “You do live here.”

“Over there,” I answered, jerking my thumb over toward the rhododendron. “It’s your son’s birthday?”

The woman reached down a hand and cupped it over Rainbow-face’s blond hair. “Yes. Danny. He’s five.”

“That’s great.”

“It’s loud is what it is,” she laughed. “I’m Tiffany, by the way.”

“Annie.” The second I said my real name, I wished I could suck it back.

“Mommy!” cried the girl with half a sun. “Finish me.”

“I’d better go,” Tiffany said.

“Have fun,” I said.

“Thank you.”

I ducked into the laundry as fast as I could. For some reason my heart was pounding hard. That woman stressed me out.

All my clothes together made only one load. Tee shirts, bras. Cutoff shorts. My nightgown. A few of the towels. Underwear.

I shoved the blue ones with the white flowers in first, as if someone might come in and see them. Smell them, even, and guess my secret. Know what I was doing.

I was smiling as I dumped in the half-cup of soap and a few of my precious quarters.

In the far corner of the small room there was a lawn chair with frayed plastic ribbing and I grabbed it, took it outside to the other side of the building, away from the birthday party and Tiffany with the bruises and dark eyes who somehow managed to still give her son a birthday party with pirate face paint.

A gesture so full of love and hope it made my heart hurt.

I settled the chair down in a small copse of dandelions next to a dark trailer that seemed empty. The sun was hot today, but there was a rare breeze blowing, keeping things moving, and in the shade of the trailer it was actually quite nice.

It had been years since I’d been able to sit down in the middle of the day to read. It felt…decadent. Sighing with pleasure, I opened up my book and slipped seamlessly into Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet’s world.

It took a while for me to notice the girl standing nearby, but when I finally did, I jumped, startled. The little girl had three suns, one on each cheek and one on her forehead, with a flower on the bridge of her nose.

“Hi,” I said with a smile.

“Cake?”

The girl held out a plate with a piece of yellow cake with chocolate frosting and roughly a pound of sprinkles on it.

“For me?” I asked. The girl nodded and walked over to me, nearly tripping on the uneven ground, but I caught her and the cake in the nick of time.

“Thank you so much!” I said.

“You welcome,” the girl said, with very nice manners and a sparkly grin revealing a mouth full of little teeth. She had a pink barrette barely hanging onto her curly light brown hair.

She skipped off as quickly as she came. And I looked down at the cake. The sprinkles, the half a Y written in blue frosting.

Birthday cake.

God, how long had it been…

Even though I didn’t want to, because the memories were bound to disappoint, I tried to remember the last time I’d had one. For myself. Or for Mom. Hoyt. And the only one I could remember was when I was really young. Walking with my mom out to the cabin behind the barn where Smith lived. He’d opened the door to his cabin, wearing his jeans and a white undershirt and nothing else, and Mom had looked away, her eyes on the far fields.

I stared at his tattoos. He’d had lots. Army stuff from the Gulf War.

“Morning,” he’d said with that rough, gravelly smoker’s growl he had, but Mom had stayed silent. Eyes averted. Cheeks red in the dawn.

“We made you a cake!” I had said, jumping a little because there’d never been a cake-making experience in my life.

“Take it,” Mom had said, still not looking at him. She shoved the plate at Smith, who caught it just before it went all over his white shirt. “Come on, Annie, we got work.”

And there’d never been a cake-making experience again.

My long sigh came out in shuddery stages, the memory an uncomfortable one. All those adult motivations and feelings still shrouded in shadow and mystery. Mom had been…unfathomable, at best.

I stood, my butt numb, and went to push my wet things into the dryer.

In the distance there was the rumble of a car engine that needed a serious tune-up. Which was weird, because almost no one got off the highway on this road, or used it to get to the highway. It was nothing but swamp and forests past the campground.

The engine roar got louder and then nearly deafening as it turned into the drive of the RV park.

Heart in my throat, I glanced out the door of the laundry only to see an old blue Dodge muscle car come to a stop right next to Tiffany’s trailer. Blue and red balloons collided and bounced off the side of the trailer.

When the man behind the wheel turned off the motor, the silence was deafening. And my old sixth sense about danger crackled.

This wasn’t good.

“Hey, Phil,” Tiffany said as she came out of the trailer. No little girls clinging to her. No face paint. Just her and enough tension to make the air too thick to breathe.

There was not anything about Tiffany that I didn’t recognize from my worst memories. That false smile spreading only so far over a fear she could not hide. The rounded curve of her shoulders as if she was already figuring out how to protect herself from his fists. The preemptive kiss, dry and full of self-loathing, placed on the rough plane of the man’s cheek once he got out of the rusty blue car.

“I didn’t think you were going to be home until next week,” Tiffany said to a small man wearing a tee shirt and jeans a few sizes too big. He had mean eyes and big hands. A terrible combination.

The hair rose on my neck.

My throat closed with fear.

Quickly as I could, I ducked back inside the concrete walls of the laundry room, but through the open door I could still hear Tiffany and Phil talking.