I was stung by the sentence, but it wasn't exactly a revelation. I figured she was running around with this black-haired cowboy she worked with. Something was going on. What was confusing was who put the note in the cedar chest. Who would even want to save a scrap like that?

Mama finally left my father and the black-haired cowboy or whoever he was, and moved to Tampa to live with another man. She came to visit me once during this period. She sat in my one-room apartment beneath a poster of flying dykes from the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, uncomfortable, as if she were visiting a stranger. I sat across the room from her, staring at the shadows the yellow lamplight made on her face.

It wasn't until after she died that I found the note she stuck inside my dictionary that night. "Help me; I need your help," she'd scrawled on a piece of drawing paper. It was strange, finding those words stuck in my dictionary months after she died. It was as if she'd known I'd snooped all those years; as if she were saying, "Here, find this." I kept it, even though it reminded me of how sad she'd been and how little I'd been able to do about it.

After her death, my sister went down south to clean out my stepfather and mother's trailer. As she moved boxes outside, the woman next door came over and shouted at her: "They were nothing but a couple of drunks." In the end, I suppose that's how she appeared. Maybe that's what drove me to tell her to get fucked the day before she died. But that's not how she appears to me now. Maybe it's because I wish I could rewrite my last words to her, have the story end a different way.

Yes, she scared the hell out of me when I was a child. She hurt me. She stole corn from a field in the country, filled the trunk to the brim while I cried, worried she'd get shot. But she also took me to a Jackson County farm to pick hampers of White Acre peas she paid for. She taught me to appreciate the tinny sound of AM country-music radio. She let me drive to Panama City Beach when I was 12 years old. She bought me drawing paper when she thought I wanted to be an artist. She taught me how to bait a hook and how to hold a bream in my hand without getting finned.

I think of her at the oddest moments -- when my girlfriend and I travel to Central Florida on back roads and pass one of those rinky-dink horse-riding corrals. I stopped at one of those once with my mother, and still remember the way she looked in the dappled green shadows beneath the trees. I think of her when I go to the Gulf of Mexico or see a stringer full of silver fish, a varnished bamboo fishing pole, paper kites, a car driving down a road with a roostertail of red Georgia dirt blowing up behind it.

I can't remember my mother's voice anymore, how she sounded when she said, "I wish I'd never had you," but I remember how she looked in her white cotton nightgown, leaning over me at night, nibbling words into my ears, Mmmmmmm, I love you. Her breasts brushed against the sheets as she bowed her body over my bed. I remember her smell, the sweet, cherry-almond scent of Jergens Lotion. I can't remember the exact brown of her eyes or how long her eyelashes were or how her lips were shaped, but I can remember how her chin rested on the top of my head, making us a perfect circle, just for a moment.

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