The woman who graded her daughters at the breakfast table.

The woman who scored posture and skin clarity and waist measurements on two girls for eighteen years.

The woman who locked the pantry for three days before a county pageant and hung the sash where the key used to hang.

She has been erased down to the studs.

And what is left, underneath all of it, is a woman who wants to know if you’ve eaten.

I sat there holding a shortbread cookie in a paper napkin and understood that I had driven three hours to Kentucky to find somebody to be angry at, and that there was nobody home.