Until I got older than she ever lived to be, I worried that this would happen to me too. Not until I had been calling Eva “Mom” for a long time did anyone tell me that my real mother, an athlete who’d been courted by the women’s leagues right before the war, had been hit in the head with a baseball bat when she was nineteen and then, at twenty-three, had crashed through a car’s windshield at fifty miles an hour, wounding the same spot on her skull. Doctors who are my cousins tell me now that clot was slow to build and slow to move; the years she got afterwards were extra. Not to me, of course, but I imagine she would have thought about it that way.

Anyway, at the end of that first year, I gave it up. Maybe I stopped telling those big lies about my mother’s death because for high school I actually went to one school straight through, even though we did move again when I was sixteen. The thing is, we stayed in the same district; everybody there already knew my story. Or maybe the high drama that is adolescence simply obliterated my dead mother. She couldn’t compete with my cute boyfriend Ricky or my smart boyfriend Spike. She couldn’t hold my interest like Sandy, Linda and Karen, who smoked Luckies, drank cokes and ate fries with me at Frank’s every day at noon until we graduated. Along with legions of careless children, I ignored my dead mother just like we all ignored the live ones in that welter of pounding music, tampons and early sex. Maybe I stopped talking about my dead mother because I had given myself up to this other woman – the woman who raised, who even adopted, me and Artie. (Why do you say your mother died? Sandy asked me once. Who is that woman, then? You always call her Mom.) Or maybe it was because I stopped hearing her voice in the hall anymore, even before we moved from upstairs of the Dellaringas. In our last year there, they put in wall-to-wall carpeting that slipped all the way up the stairs, thick and grey as a gym mat. I think it must have muffled the sound.

First published in StringTown #5, 2001.