June 2011. Annie May dropped her bombshell in the middle of the evening news. Besides me and Baby Desiree, the only person who heard it was Mary Katherine, and she won’t talk about it, just gives you a dirty look when you bring it up.

Desi had been born in June, and my cousin was still busily making the introductory rounds. Mary Katherine had been a Tri-Delt in college, and Baby Desiree was her first kid - of course, she couldn’t be expected to lug bag and baggage all over the state by her lonesome, so I was volunteered. Since I was out of school for the summer and unemployed, the family decided I had nothing better to do than tag along to play valet.

It could have been worse, I guess. Desiree was a good baby, and at least Mary Katherine didn’t give me crap about smoking, my lack of a boyfriend, or my grades; she was more concerned with my fashion sense, or rather lack thereof. We spent the summer flying down dirt roads and gravel roads, through cane fields and stands of cypress, with Mary Katherine going a mile a minute about skin-care products while I sat in the back making faces at Desi.

Annie May lived in the middle of a hundred acres of soybean fields. She was a great-aunt on one side and some kind of cousin on the other, plus she was my step-grandma’s mother. She was a distant enough relative, blood-wise and geographically, that a visit wasn’t really obligatory. But Mary Katherine was a show-off when it came to Desi, and besides, we were on our way home from another visit to a cousin closer on the family tree but farther up the road. And Annie May was old; we glanced at each other with the unspoken acknowledgement that this might be our last chance, and guiltily decided to make the detour.

Mary Katherine’s Hyundai bounced up the washboard road to Annie May’s house in a cloud of dust which took nearly five minutes to settle. We sat in the car until it subsided so the baby wouldn’t choke, and so Mary Katherine could finish her lecture on hair coloring. As soon as she shut up, I bolted out of the car and lit a cigarette, trying to get a few drags in before going up to the house. My cousin snorted at me and started loading me down with the diaper bag, a cooler, her purse, and a backpack full of toys, then picked up Desi and marched up the cracked path to the front door.

Mary Katherine is not a patient person – she rang the doorbell four times in the space of a minute, knocked for another few seconds, and was striding around to the back of the house in a huff by the time Annie May opened the door. I hadn’t budged; all that baby junk was heavy. I’d also seen Annie May since Mary Katherine had, and had a better idea of how much she was slowing down. Once a person reaches a certain age, you’ve got to make some allowances.

Annie May was ninety-seven, and still lived by herself. The family had talked from the time I was little about putting her in a home, but someone always pointed out that she was doing just fine. She got around great, gardened on five acres without so much as a tiller – hell, she still butchered her own hogs. She had electricity and gas, and Uncle Ralph (who wasn’t really an uncle) lived only a mile away, Just In Case. In defiance of the fluttering of some of the control-freaks in the family, like Mary Katherine’s mom, Annie May remained in the house where she had spent her entire adult life.

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