She looked forward to that for a long time,” Jeannie added softly. “Anyway. Yes, she was five, and then she grew up, and she helped her family out. A lot. She was sharp as a tack, and she could put on this totally innocent little face. Nobody who saw her believed she’d do anything wrong, at least not on purpose.”
Sometimes, Dana felt like she could sense the difference in her own eyes, especially when she got mad. The brown one burned hotter. The green one saw sharper. She felt it now—a contained energy simmering inside her as she glared at this woman and all her stories.
Jeannie stared right back—calm, a little tired, but ready to be patient.
That was when Dana saw it.
She didn’t guess at it or hope for it. She saw the shape of Mom’s face on this other woman. She saw the stiff way Mom held herself sometimes when she was trying not to let Dana know she was mad.
She was telling the truth. This woman who called herself Jeannie Bowen was Deborah Ann Watts. Dana’s grandmother.
All at once, that sickening, familiar off-balance feeling hit her, the same one she had when she’d sat all buckled into her father’s car, listening to him explain how it would be too difficult to tell his kids she was their sister.
Because Mom must have known about how often and how easily Jeannie changed her name, but she never said that. She only told Dana about the one name—and it just happened to be the name that was least likely to have an internet trail.
Dana shoved her hands under the table and clamped them between her knees. She did not want Jeannie—Grandma Jeannie—to see how bad she was shaking.
But just like with Mom, it didn’t do any good.
“You okay, Dana? I know this is a lot—”
Dana didn’t let her finish. “So, you’re saying Mom did what, exactly? She shoplifted?” She hoped she sounded blasé, but there was no way to tell.
Jeannie shrugged. “Lifted, carried, kept a lookout—whatever we needed. She wanted to do her part for the family. And Christ, did she love it when she helped with a big score. Lit up like a Christmas tree.”
Jeannie stopped again, as if she just noticed what she was saying and who she was talking to. “She was little, Dana,” she said quickly. “When you’re a little kid, you only know about right and wrong because of what people tell you, and her dad told her—we told her—it was all okay.”
Dana looked around her. Everything was…normal. People typed on laptops and phones. The baristas called out names and orders. The air smelled like coffee and sugar. Nobody else was getting their mind blown. Nobody even noticed.
Except Chelsea, of course. Chelsea was glaring at her and seriously pissed off. Dana could tell that she was not going to hang around for much longer.
Dana looked at her phone. It was already 4:15. She needed to be done, in case Mom checked up on her or came home early. And by the time Mom did come home, Dana needed to be done feeling this—whatever the hell this weird mix of confused and scared and hopeful and sick all at once was—because Mom would see something was wrong in a hot second.
“Dana, I mean it.” Jeannie ducked her head, trying to catch Dana’s eye. “Nothing that happened was your mom’s fault or her idea. It was just the way things were.”
“You still haven’t told me why you ran out on her.”
Jeannie sighed. “Okay, okay. It’s not…it’s not pretty, all right? By the time she came along, me and Todd—your grandfather—we’d been living off the books for years. When we were young, it was a whole big rebel-rebel thing. We wasn’t gonna be no slaves to ‘da man’!” She flipped both middle fingers up. “But after a while…we just didn’t know how else to live. So, we hustled, whatever and however we could. And when you live like that, eventually you get into some heavy shit.”
“Like what? Drugs or something?”
“Well, pills anyway. You know this whole ‘opioid crisis’ thing?” Jeannie made the air quotes. “It was just cranking into high gear back then. So, what Todd and I did was drive around to different clinics in different small towns, mostly down around southern Tennessee and Georgia, sometimes up as far as Kentucky or over to Pennsylvania. Anyway, when we found the right kind of clinic, we’d go in and tell them about this pain or that. They’d fill out