They were Irish Catholic and, for a few years, a Catholic school in Bay St. Jack would drive back into New Orleans on occasion for odd jobs.

Her youngest brother, Stephen, was so small they put him in a dresser drawer on the backseat for the drive over. They moved just across the state line to a little house on the coast in Mississippi. They lost their house in New Orleans when she was 5 or 6 years old, evicted, probably after he lost another job.

My mother was born in New Orleans in 1953, the same year as Lucinda. Some nights, I would wake at the sound of a horrible noise below, and when I would investigate halfway down the staircase, I would have seen her cleaning in the living room, running a vacuum before bed. She would have made her white sheets on the couch with tight hospital corners at night, and then unmade them every morning before work so that the couch could be used during the day. My mother slept on the couch in the living room and, if that sounds untidy, sleeping on the couch in the living room, I assure you it was not. I could have seen a swamp from my bedroom window, and on some Saturday mornings, between days at my new elementary school, I would have wandered into the muck of it to look at the family of nutria living together there. My sister and I slept on the second floor of the little apartment. I don’t remember anything about that time as clearly as I remember the smell of the grain elevator. To get to it, you would have had to take a long drive that passed under a grain elevator that loaded barges on the Mississippi. It would have been a small apartment that we moved into, far from my father’s house in Baton Rouge. This memory would be in the car, because that was the year my mother took an apartment outside of New Orleans to be closer to work.

I’m putting this in the conditional tense because of my uncertainty on the facts. My first memory of it, Lucinda’s voice, would have been at 7 or 8 years old, around the time my parents split up. Y mother would listen to Lucinda Williams in the car.

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