I watched the shaft of moonlight until I fell asleep, sometime after midnight. I dreamed about field corn, and Abby, and my name.

“For heaven’s sake,” my mother said, “it’s not that bad. You’re lucky you weren’t blinded, or worse.”

“What could be worse?”

“A glass eye. An empty socket. Your eyelids sewn shut over a gaping hole.”

“Here now,” my grandmother interrupted, “there’s no need for that.” She sat at the dining room table shelling field peas. “Just tell Hunter to stop calling you Popeye. If you kick up enough fuss . . .”

“If I kick up any fuss, he’ll never stop. You know how he is.”

“It’s your own fault,” Nana said. “You’ll answer to any awful nickname. You ought to insist on your given name.”

“I hate Mary Frances.”

“Well, I don’t know why. Mary Frances is a pretty name.”

“I’m not pretty.”

“You’re not when you flop on a chair like that with your legs all splayed out. You want to sit up straight, stop hunching over, and cross your legs at the ankle. It’s high time you started acting like a lady.”

I remained where I was. Unless she got up to pinch me—and she’d been known to—I didn’t bother to correct myself.

“And while I’m thinking about it,” she went on, “I will pay you to take off those raggedy old cut-offs and put on something decent. People will think you don’t have any better.”

“No one cares about my shorts.”

“I care. They have a hole in them. I can see clear to Chattanooga. You make me wish I had a long stick with a pin on it—then you’d learn to sit right.” A line of peas rolled into the metal mixing bowl. “Your mistake was letting people call you anything other than the name you were born with. No one has ever called me anything but Myrtle.”

“Not true. Hunter calls you Dolly.”

“He calls every woman with big boobs Dolly,” my mother observed.

“It’s disgusting and sexist.” I sat up in the chair, not to correct my posture but to better make my point. “Why don’t you object to that?”

Nana dismissed this with the wave of a pea pod. “It’s just nicknaming,” she said. “Why should you mind? You were called Mary Frances until you went to school. You started letting people call you Frankie, and Fran, and I don’t know what all . . .”

“Frank,” I said.

Nana rolled her eyes. “Frank. You shouldn’t have been allowed to get away with that.” She cast a pointed look at my mother. “If they’re calling her Popeye at school, someone should call her teacher and tell her . . .”

“She’s in high school now,” my mother said calmly. “She has more than one teacher. She can sort out for herself what she wants to be called. If that’s Popeye, Frank, or Rosy Red Ringbaum, it’s not up to me to decide. I’ll abide by her wishes, but she’ll have to enforce them at school. As for Daddy, no one can make him do anything.”

“Poppy,” Nana said. “That’s like Popeye, only it’s nice. It’s a flower. Very feminine. What about that?”

“Good God,” I said.

“You know I hate it when you talk like that, Poppy. It’s common and trashy.”

“Poppy,” Nana said, hugging me. “It’s so good to see you. Have you lost weight?” She spun me around and examined me from all angles. “I believe you have. Look how skinny she is, Barbara. You’re too skinny. Is everything all right?”

“It’s the surgery. I lost weight before, and then I wasn’t hungry after, and, all in all, I’m down about fifteen pounds. I’ve got my appetite back now.”

“Good,” my mother said. I hugged her, too. She and my grandmother both seemed to have shrunk since I’d last seen them, though it had been only a couple of years. My mother was five foot five, and my grandmother an inch or so taller, and yet I towered over them like Shaquille O’Neal. “You’re not too skinny. You look fine, unlike me. I could do with six months on a desert island, living off the fat of the land, so to speak.” She patted her stomach.

“You always say that, Ma, but you look great.”

“I’m so glad to hear you say that because I’m starving. Where would you like to eat?”

I laughed. Then I said, “Don’t we need to go to the hospital first?”

She shook her head. “We’ve already been, first thing this morning. There’s no change. Dr. Adkins—that’s the doctor who’s treating him—wants us to come back at noon to talk about his options. I told her I wanted to wait until you could be there.”

“I’m ready whenever. So, how about Fat Daddy’s?”

“Well,” my mother hesitated. “I don’t really like Fat Daddy’s. Too greasy. Is there anywhere else?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been in Raleigh for a while. What about Courtney’s, is that still open?”

“It is, but we just ate there day before yesterday.”

I turned to my grandmother. “Where would you like to go, Nana?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “You decide.”

“How about Gregory’s?”

“I prefer Big Ed’s in the City Market,” she said.

“Big Ed’s,” my mother agreed. “That’s good. Have you been to Big Ed’s?”

“No.”

“You’d like it. They have good food.”

By that point, I didn’t care if they served French fried toe-nail clippings. Five minutes in the bosom of my family, and I found myself playing the Great Magnifico, breakfast mind reader. It was an old pattern, and it drove me crazy. It also felt welcoming and familiar. I could fly to the moon or sail the seven seas, but when I finally got back home, I’d have to stand around in a parking lot guessing where it was Nana and my mother wanted me to say I wanted to eat.

We walked up Hillsborough Street to where my mother had parked her ancient Datsun. It was a faded, rusty yellow and it burned oil, but she’d managed to get nearly three hundred thousand miles out of it.

“You could have used the valet parking,” I said. “All you had to do was give them my room number.”

“My car would have died of shock. Or the valet would have.” My mother unlocked the passenger side door, and I was faced with the age-old dilemma, Granny in the front or the back? Nana was a notorious backseat driver. She’d be better able to shout instructions from the co-pilot’s chair. Also, she was eighty years old. It would take her twenty minutes to climb over the front seat and into the back. On the other hand, there were the questions of knee-room and stitches.

“I’m torn,” I said. “Politeness tells me to let you have the front, but my hysterectomy says, ‘Be rude to your granny.’”

“I’ll get in the back,” Nana said. “You can ride up front with your mama.”

“Actually,” my mother said, “I was going to let Poppy drive.”

“Oh lord.” Nana’s hand fluttered up to her chest. “Then I am definitely riding in the back. With my eyes shut.”

Once again, I was a fifteen-year-old with a learner’s permit. My grandmother sat in the back seat and screeched and gasped at every opportunity, nearly causing more wrecks than she prevented.

“No thanks,” I said, swallowing my irritation. “I’m not supposed to be driving yet. That’s why Abby took the car this morning.”

Abby had actually taken the car on the grounds that she needed a getaway vehicle more than I did. Edna had expressed a restrained pleasure when Abby had called her that morning. It quickly faded when she said that she’d come with me. When Edna was feeling charitable, she referred to me as ‘that white girl.’ This morning, I was ‘that crazy white girl.’ She blamed me for Abby being a ‘bulldagger.’ Never mind that I had nothing directly to do with it. I was gay first, Abby and I were friends, ergo I led Abby astray. Edna was perfectly polite to me the times I’d been to her house, she could even have been described as cordial, but you could have cut the air with a knife.

“How is Abby?” my mother asked. “Is she still working at the same place?”

“Still working trauma at Emanuel. That hospital would fall apart without her.”

“It’s good of her to come home with you.”

“It’s good of you to let her use your rental car,” said Nana, fumbling with her seat belt. “I think she takes advantage.”