Of all the memories that I have of my great great grandmother from the first thirteen years of my life, the one that I remember most of all occurred in the tiny kitchen of her small home, tucked away in the orchards of Live Oak. I was in sixth grade, and she was teaching me how to sweep the right way, a skillset that my mother had still yet to properly impart upon me; she was too busy smoking weed and sleeping with her latest boyfriend.

When my daughter was born, I was worried that I wouldn’t be the one she would call out for in the middle of the night.

Josh brings her warm, tear-soaked body into our king-sized bed – all 29 pounds of my two- and-a-half-year-old. The bed is already fully occupied. Me, Josh and my almost four-year-old son, Miles, sprawled out as if he was attempting to make snow angels in his sleep. But I still welcome Lyla with outstretched arms.

“Like, would that string really have stayed on her finger for fourteen years?” Lindsey asks, and I laugh in the carefree manner typically brought about by cheap vodka.

“Well, it’s magic string,” I respond, “because it’s infused with love.”

We continue to watch, a bowl of popcorn between us, buzzing on the fruit-flavored Smirnoff I am finally able to buy legally now that I’ve just turned twenty-one. It is summer; the semester has ended; we are each home from college.

A small engraved bell with a clapper sat on the teak coffee table in the room where my father lay dying. He no longer had the strength to call my mother so this was the instrument he used to summon her. I heard it from the kitchen and went into the living room.

She promised me the good wine. The bottle her boss gave her as a reward for staying late on a Friday. But when we arrived at her Brooklyn apartment, she instead grabbed an open bottle of white in her fridge. I didn’t care. My vulva was pulsing like a heartbeat.

Blessed are those who hit the snooze button;
for they shall receive nine more minutes of sleep, unless they accidentally hit the stop button and awake in a panic an hour later.