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told Craig then, I said to him, ‘How is it a wedding without my daughter here? She should be here, with us. She should be my maid of honor.’ ”
    Bobbie shakes her head. She thinks of her mother in a white bridal dress beside Craig. In her head is the mother she remembers, round and young with a ruddy brown bob and clear, green eyes that had the luminous quality of stained glass. In front of her this new version of her mother, with her thin over-dyed hair and the tribal jewelry, seems another person.
    June says, “And now, just when Craig is recovering from this last pack of lies from that girl, you come along and accuse him? You’re saying Craig
molested
you? You let thirty years pass to tell the world this?”
    June smells like sour wine, Bobbie now realizes. Her mother has reached a time of day in which all the hours topping up her wineglass are showing a cumulative effect.
    “
Molest
isn’t one of the words I used,” Bobbie says.
    “But it amounts to that, doesn’t it? Molested you as a child?”
    “I guess so. Yes.”
    “Well, that is impossible! I think you are mixing things up,” June says. She steps toward Bobbie. “Is that it, darling? Did something happen to you after you left home? Did someone hurt you and now you think it was Craig? Because I’ve heard of such cases!”
    June smiles at Bobbie. She is on Bobbie’s side if only Bobbie will let go of this idea that Craig—Craig, of all people—ever hurt her. She stands with her arms outstretched, inviting Bobbie to come and hug her. But there is something preposterous about the gesture. And an oddness, too, about the way June is smiling. Close up, Bobbie sees that her mother’s eyes seem slightly dead, as though that part of her face is not participating. She feels a flash of concern, considering perhaps her mother has suffered a stroke. But then she detects the same unusual aspect to June’s forehead, too. She sees the skin there is like smooth putty, and she knows at once it is the copious use of Botox, not a stroke, that has frozen her mother’s face. She hasn’t lived in California all these years without acquiring a little expertise in that area.
    “My God, Mother, you can’t wrinkle,” she says, and touches her own forehead with her hand.
    June scoffs. “Oh please, you get to this age and watch your brow line crumple.”
    “It doesn’t look bad,” Bobbie says. “But why?”
    “Are you going to start on a ‘love your wrinkles’ campaign? Because having your daughter bring charges against your husband can cause a wrinkle or two.”
    Bobbie finds her jeans and pulls them on under her nightgown, doing up the fly. “I don’t think you are meant to talk to me before the trial. I’ll drive you home.”
    “Oh, please, sweetheart. I’m sorry if I’ve said the wrong thing.”
    “You’re only here to convince me not to go through with it.”
    June says, “Don’t be silly, I’m here because you’re my daughter! I’ve barely heard from you for years. Don’t you think that was unnecessary? You’d send little gifts but never make an actual appearance. Don’t you think that was a little cruel?”
    She might have said yes. It was cruel. Bobbie has sent birthday cards and Christmas cakes. For many years on Mother’s Day she has arranged for bouquets of yellow roses to be delivered to the door. All of this, she understands, she did as much for herself as for her mother, little gestures that stemmed a tide of guilt that forever threatened to engulf her for making her mother worry, for being absent as June aged. For there is a part of her that still wants to protect her mother.
    “You have no idea the kind of pain—” June is saying.
    Bobbie hates making her upset. But she also doubts the woman is being honest. June’s distress may only be a ploy, Bobbie thinks, and so she tries not to feel pity. Instead, she focuses on her mother’s lash extensions. She hopes her mother’s beauty efforts aren’t all to please