For dinner, her mother served fried chicken, and butter layered collard greens and homemade wheat biscuits, her favorite meal. Alecia's father and Ryder talked the whole dinner about politics while her mother told her of the three new babies she helped bring into this world over the last semester. Alecia looked around the small dining room, with the china cabinet behind them, full of her mother’s wedding day china from Belks. Her wedding china wouldn’t come from Belks but some upscale store she had never heard of or ordered from France.

This seemed odd, surreal for Ryder to be here dining at the table that her grandparents had

eaten off...