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her to yell some more until finally she came through the swinging door and saw me standing there.
    â€œHow long have you been in here, young lady?” Her hands were tying a silk scarf expertly around her slender neck. My mother could put on clothes and makeup in the pitch dark and still come out looking like a million bucks. “Oh, never mind. Come on.”
    With Daddy in his work shed—out of reach, like the safety zone in a kids’ game of cops and robbers—I had no choice but to follow Momma and endure her “light check,” a procedure I had watched Suzanne put up with for years. I walked behind Momma to the back door in the den—the place she had long ago deemed best suited for this absurd anddraconian purpose—and waited while she opened it wide. I went to the doorway, turned around to face her, and planted my feet hip-width apart. Momma stood glaring in front of me, squinting into the sun, checking to see if the light shining through my skirt was showcasing my legs.
    â€œGo straight to your room this minute, young lady, and put a slip on.”
    I made a face at her behind her back when she turned to go off in search of her constantly misplaced car keys. Who cares if someone sees the outline of my legs; it’s no different from when I wear shorts, I wanted to yell, but I knew better than to argue with her, especially without Daddy on my side. As I passed the den’s picture window, I glimpsed his work shed and longed to be in there with him. Hidden in there with him. Never to have light checks or go to mass with just Momma and Suzanne again. Then seven months later, right after I turned fourteen, when Daddy left us, I didn’t have to put slips on at all anymore because Momma barely left her bedroom.
    But in the socially accepted seminudity here in L.A.—people go around as if they are constantly in the middle of a workout—I wear slips by themselves. Or used to. I’m actually more careful about that now, since an incident almost two years ago on a summer day right after Momma died, a day when the tears didn’t so much stop as just sit right below the surface all lined up waiting for one errant memory to trip their flow.
    I was browsing on Melrose—not in the crowded retail part, but farther east where a few fabulous shops dot stretches of nothingness—in a mid-century furniture store. The designs were vastly unlike those I grew up with, so I thought it’d be a good distraction. I was admiring a low coffee table, all curved lines and golden glow, when a woman came into the store who had my mother’s forehead. The resemblance nearly knocked me over. The stunning widow’s peak that urged you to look down at the perfectly proportioned expanse, then to the naturally arched brows and the bridge of the nose that demurely finished it off.
    The woman did not have my momma’s eyes—no one could. One of Momma’s eyes was hazel, the other green, as if the light she emittedwas so complex that her eyes needed two hues. Like dichroic tourmaline, gems that have more than one color when viewed from different angles; Momma’s eyes did that, too.
    The woman turned to face me so she could have a better look at a bedroom set near the golden curvy coffee table I still stood by. She was asking the store’s owner questions, pulling out her measuring tape, discussing size, so very much alive, and with my momma’s gentle brow and creamy skin, but on this perfect stranger, on her and on my mother no more. I turned too quickly to leave, bumped into an old hi-fi—good God, not memories of Daddy, too—and rushed to get out of the store before the crying started, but my tears raced ahead, beating me as I opened the door. I hurried to my truck parked just up the block, slopping along like an overfilled bucket, leaving water drops in my wake. The day’s bright heat was like too many bodies pressed together for a hug, no affection