The stories I imagine behind those photographs seem as real to me as actual memories. What happened in real real life? The life I experienced? Consider me unreliable. I told my mother to fuck off, after all.

I am sitting in my mother's lap in my cousin Billy's backyard, a garden full of ferns, fountains, birds of paradise. Wind chimes dangle from the branch of a Japanese magnolia. Mama's chin is resting softly against the top of my head. The grass we sit on is so lush and green it's almost blue.

Even though I like sitting in my mother's lap, her chin pressed against the top of my head, my small body folded into hers, I want to get up and walk across that green grass and down the beaten path to the metal pens where my cousin's father, King, raised quail. I liked the smell of birdshit and cornmeal, the brownness of it all, the birds running back and forth in the powdery dirt, the worn wood, the earth beneath my feet.

When I think of that moment, I feel how torn I was between the quail and my mother. Her chin resting on my head was the completion of a circle, her body looped around mine. That circle said "You belong to me." I should've savored the moment, and I suppose I did or I wouldn't have remembered it, but the birds won, and I found myself edging through the azaleas to walk down the path bordered by weeds.

I looped my fingers into the wire pen, stared at the birds' speckled brown feathers as they darted back and forth. I hadn't learned yet to hold on to my mother's happiness while it lasted.

It never lasted long. One morning, completely flustered by trying to get my brothers and sister and I out the door and up the hill to school, she threw my satchel on the floor and started shouting, "I wish I'd never had any of you!" She ran into her bedroom, flung herself onto her bed and started crying uncontrollably.

I remember moving forward to touch her, feeling sick on my stomach, on the verge of tears myself. I don't remember what happened later that day -- my father probably came home, set things right. I can't remember leaving the side of her bed. In that memory I stand there, never moving, watching my mother sob into her hands, my heart forever breaking.

My mother was a study in opposites: a classic manic-depressive, full of light and dark. When she wasn't suffering from one of her depressions, she took me and my brothers and sister to the Gulf of Mexico where she wore a bikini and we had picnics and built sand castles and played Goofy Golf.

Back home, she took us out to the country to fly kites. She let us drive down red dirt roads before we were old enough, and took us fishing practically every day during the summer. She once saved a boy from drowning even though she couldn't swim herself, and she managed to laugh about the rattlesnake who'd crawled up under the quilt she sat on while she fished at Lake Seminole.

She would go into the bait store to buy crickets or worms, but she wouldn't answer the door at our house. Once when a favorite teacher of mine came to visit, my mother locked herself in the bedroom and wouldn't come out. Her inability to face people led to my having to go into the drugstore to get refills of the drugs she was addicted to, after my brothers refused to. I died of embarrassment every time.

Gradually, she began drinking, too, and once drunk, she'd climb out of the windows and sit hunched over in the dirt beneath the azaleas, not even speaking to us when we begged her to come back into the house.

When she and father weren't home, my sister and I snuck into their bedroom to snoop around. It was silent and still as a church, full of mysteries. My sister and I always dug in the cedar chest to look at the blue jumper Mama'd worn as a baby. In the beginning there were quilts and old pocketbooks, and a blue-and-green silk dress I never saw her wear, couldn't even imagine her wearing. There was a Nazi flag my father said he took from some dead Germans at the end of World War II.

Later, there were surprises, the things my parents hid, revealing they'd changed. We found a dirty-joke book in the closet; another time we found a manual on how to have sex. And then one afternoon, probably the last afternoon we snooped, there was a note in an envelope, a scrawl of words that said "Your wife is having an affair."

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