Cherry reflects on her lifelong devotion to accuracy, recalling how she corrected teachers as a child and noting that this same trait made her go viral as "the Death Lady." She draws a parallel between her own sudden notoriety and her mother Mae's transformation into "Madame Mae," a fortune teller, which happened on a slower, more local scale.

After Cherry's father died, her mother refused to touch the life insurance money, which Auntie Pat arranged to be deposited into an account for Cherry's future. Mae needed to support herself and Cherry, and gradually reinvented herself as a fortune teller. She studied books on spirits, tarot, and occult gifts, transformed the back veranda into a dimly lit office, and adopted a dramatic look with scarves, bracelets, eyeliner, and red lipstick.

Mae launched her fortune-telling business by offering half-price readings to influential neighborhood women. Her most successful early client was Mrs. Shaw, the cake shop widow with seven children. Mae predicted an odd illness, a small financial windfall, and a beautiful new baby for Mrs. Shaw—all of which came true in quick succession. Mrs. Shaw enthusiastically told everyone, making Mae's reputation spread rapidly. Cherry, however, saw through all of it: Mrs. Shaw was a known hypochondriac, had been finding her late husband's hidden cash, and had multiple recently married daughters likely to become pregnant.

Mae's business grew as people traveled long distances for readings. Cherry's grandparents were horrified and sent Father O'Malley to set Mae straight. Over tea, Mae told the priest she saw a "forbidden love" in his future. He left quickly, and three years later he left the priesthood after falling in love with a married woman. Cherry suggests her mother simply noticed the priest's wandering eyes and intuited his weakness for celibacy, rather than possessing any supernatural gift.

Cherry acknowledges that while she has always favored logic over mysticism, she came to appreciate logic's limits. At nineteen, she learned about Gödel's incompleteness theorem—that in any reasonable mathematical system, some true statements cannot be proved—and ruefully conceded her mother may have had a point about the limits of logical explanation.