Basketball. Lucy Jane Bledsoe

It's kind of a dump now, and that made her sad. She'd put so much work into it. Not to mention, she'd met my father there, although of course she wouldn't admit that the place held any sweet nostalgia for her. It was the work she regretted.

      The following week, Michael parked his truck in front again, and Mom thought it was for the food and for ogling Merilee, which it may well have been, but he sat at the counter again, which Mom serviced, and they talked all morning. His route took him through Wallop every week and on the fourth time through, he told Mom that he'd visited two galleries, one in Santa Fe and one in Albuquerque, that showed her paintings. He said, “I like them.”

      Mom said, “Thanks.”

      Michael must have been embarrassed by his brevity, because the following week he went into detail about her colors and forms, plowing through his own embarrassment at not knowing the correct art terms because he really did want to tell her. Straightforward, Mom said, direct and honest.

      The Sex, she told me when I was thirteen, was exceptional.

      “Exceptional how?” I asked.

      “Exceptionally good.” She paused, looked at me, probably considering my age and wondering about the appropriateness of this conversation, and then made the decision she always makes, which is that the truth, the bald truth, is always the most appropriate, and added, “Mind-altering exceptional, life- changing exceptional, flat out the best sex I've ever had.” Then she looked momentarily regretful at having said so much, but ended with a shrug and said, “He's your father. You were conceived in that love. You have a right to know.”

      Even then I knew that “a right to know” meant to know the information she chose to share. It did not mean the right to know him directly.

      He quit driving the truck and opened an auto parts shop in Wallop. He said he didn't care that she couldn't have kids. He also didn't care that she didn't believe in marriage. “You should know,” Mom told me when I was sixteen, “that love is possible. Not likely, but possible. Never enduring. You'll be lucky if you have even a few months of what your father and I had.” She paused and then gave me a couple of rare descriptions. “Real tenderness. Knowing tenderness.”

      Then Mom went to New York for a friend's opening and slept with the gallery owner. She says she still doesn't know why. She slept with him twice. Her biggest regret in all of life is that she felt compelled to tell Michael about this slip when she returned to Wallop.

      He went ape-shit. Completely wall-bonging jealous. He dumped her. Cruelly. He itemized with precise detail every personality flaw in her makeup. He said he didn't know why he'd ever thought he loved her. Within a couple of weeks he was dating Sue, a tall and thin and severely beautiful woman who ran marathons. She wanted children and was pregnant, allegedly accidentally, within months. Michael married her.

      Mom sold the café and moved to New York. Not for the gallery owner. She couldn't care less about him. But she couldn't stand witnessing Michael's new life.

      Also, Mom, too, was pregnant.

      She refused to abort me. She found a doctor who was willing to take the chance and shepherd her through the dangerous pregnancy. We crashed with Sophia, her oldest friend, who had a place in the West Village. For months we lay on a mattress on the floor of Sophia's tiny apartment, Mom holding on to me for all she was worth, me surviving in that damaged uterus. There were days, she said, when she literally squeezed her vagina tight, willed me to stay inside, stay connected to the umbilical cord. To birth me, they sliced open Mom's belly, and they did that a month early. Obviously, I lived. So did Mom. In fact, we thrived.

      We spent a full year, the three of us, in Sophia's apartment, all her lesbian friends adoring me and sustaining Mom. She was, once again, through with men, and relished being an honorary lesbian, even if she couldn't will herself to be a real one. Our lives were tentative back then, and Mom likes to say that Sophia's apartment was a second womb, that we were nurtured by her best friend and her friends.

      Sophia died last year of breast cancer and Mom is pretty much inconsolable. It's the wrong time for me to spring Michael, not to mention my half-sisters, on her.

      But I'm getting ahead of myself.