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friend. They talked about the weather, his shoeshine business in the Krepp Arcade, his family, how hard it was to get rides hitchhiking, where we all lived, and was he still in school (he wasn‧t).
    Chrisanne and I were mystified. Neither of us remembered Mom ever picking up a hitchhiker before, and we wondered how she had decided on this one. He didn‧t seem like her type. Kind of grubby. On the shaggy side. He had bad grammar. And when he turned toward us, it was hard not to look at the purple blotches spread across his face like a map of islands. Chrisanne and I sat there in our dresses, hands in our laps. This guy was crudding up the niceness of our day. We were glad when he got out.
    “Good luck!” my mother said. Chrisanne and I exchanged glances. We both were thinking, Good riddance.
    “Thanks!” He smiled. His smile was friendly. We waved and smiled, too. Some of his presence seemed to linger behind in the front seat.
    “I might as well stay back here till we park, Mom,” Chrisanne said.
    “He has a hard life,” my mother said. “A hard life ahead of him.”
    “What happened to his face?” I asked her.
    “A birthmark” she said, “like the one on your arm.”

     
    I turned my arm over and looked at the underside. My own blotches are small, calm, and inconspicuous at room temperature. When I am hot, they get reddish; when I am cold, they turn bluish purple. Most of the time I forget about them, until someone says, “What is that on your arm?” Sometimes they say it in a really rude way, as if it were leprosy or something, and I try to come up with some withering retort, but I usually can‧t.
    “Oh,” I said to my mom. Now I felt bad that I hadn‧t been friendlier. I was polite, but barely. I wanted another chance. “He seemed nice,” I said.
    “Yes, he was a nice boy,” said my mom. “Though you‧d never know it to look at him.”
    Chrisanne wasn‧t paying attention to us. She had found a little runner in her nylons and was painting clear nail polish around it.
    As we walked into Home‧s, college girls in Bobbie Brooks outfits wanted to spray our wrists with perfume. The air itself seemed to be scented, and amid the polished old woodwork and the shining brass and the sparkling glass counters and chandeliers, the rich fabrics and the bustling escalators, remnants of the hitchhiker drifted lightly away. But later, when we waddled back to the car loaded up with paper shopping bags, his ghost seemed to be waiting there in the front seat. And even though he was gone the minute Chrisanne sat down, it started me thinking. Not so much about the hitchhiker as about my mother. Because usually I think I know what she thinks. It‧s not hard to know; she expresses strong opinions in a forceful way on many subjects and after a while you can imagine what her opinion will be on a person or his/her actions. From committing crimes (which is definitely wrong) to choosing sandals with straps between the toes (not wrong exactly, but shows poor judgment). I would have thought that a high school dropout with greasy hair, hitchhiking, would be someone who had made at least three bad decisions and would have to face the consequences without any help from us. Yet sometimes she reaches out with warmth and kindness to the most unlikely people. Without making a big deal about it, as if anyone with half a brain would have done the same thing. I keep trying to figure out how she chooses.
    What was it, for example, about the hitchhiker?
    I think that in a way my mother is like a proper, immaculately kept house with a secret mark made on the fence by hoboes, to tell other hoboes that a woman lives here who will feed you. If you work. And some people can look at my mother‧s composed face and see the secret signs of welcome.
    Bobby Prbyczka could see them. He had been coming to our house in the morning since June, to have coffee with my mother. I guess he saw her sitting there one day, in her lawn chair on the front