"Shirt.
Shirt." I ransacked my drawers and found and discarded two shirts.
"Clean shirt, clean shirt." "Mercy?" called Adam, sounding a little desperate--how well I knew that feeling.
"Mom, leave him alone!" I said.
"I'll be right out." Frustrated, I stared at my room.
I had to have a clean shirt somewhere.
I had just been wearing one--but it had disappeared in my search for a bra.
Finally, I pulled on a shirt that said 1984: GOVERNMENT FOR DUMMIES on the back.
It was clean, or at least it didn't stink too badly.
The oil smudge on the shoulder looked permanent.
I took a deep breath and opened the door.
I had to duck around Adam, who was leaning against the door frame.
"Hey, Mom," I said breezily.
"I see you've met my--" What? Mate? I didn't think that was something my mother needed to hear.
"I see you've met Adam." "Mercedes Athena Thompson," snapped my mother.
"Explain to me why I had to learn about what happened to you from a newspaper?" I'd been avoiding meeting her gaze, but once she three-named me, I had no choice.
My mother is five-foot-nothing.
She's only seventeen years older than me, which means she's not yet fifty and looks thirty.
She can still wear the belt buckles she won barrel racing on their original belts.
She's usually blond--I'm pretty sure it's her natural color--but the shade changes from year to year.
This year it was strawberry gold.
Her eyes are big and blue and innocent-looking, her nose slightly tip- tilted, and her mouth full and round.
With strangers, she sometimes plays a dumb blonde, batting her eyelashes and speaking in a breathy voice that anyone who watched old movies would recognize from Some Like It Hot or Bus Stop.
My mother has never, to my knowledge, changed her own flat tire.
If the sharp anger in her voice hadn't been a cover for the bruised look in her eyes, I could have responded in kind.
Instead, I shrugged.
"I don't know, Mom.
After it happened ...
I stayed coyote for a couple of days." I had a half-hysterical vision of calling her, and saying, "By the way, Mom, guess what happened to me today..." She looked me in the eyes, and I thought she saw more than I wanted her to.
"Are you all right?" I started to say yes, but a lifetime of living with creatures who could smell a lie had left me with a habit of honesty.