Summary

As this chapter begins, Ward’s family is living in a single-wide trailer in DeLisle and Ward is seven years old. Her father buys a new motorcycle. Ward’s mother frowns and walks back into the house. She doesn’t say anything to her husband about the motorcycle, who has taken money they’d been saving to buy land for the purchase of the bike.

A year after moving into the trailer, the people who own it decide to rent it to relatives instead and the family moves to live with Ward’s grandmother Dorothy in the house her mother grew up in. After Dorothy’s husband had left her to raise their seven children alone, she had added on to the house. This scenario has happened so often in Ward’s family that she thinks of her family as a matriarchy...