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like
Roseanne?”
    “There,” Mom pointed. A woman with a clipboard was talking to people, checking her list. “She’ll know.” Before I could stop
     her, Mom scooted over to the woman and flashed her VIP badge as if she were the Sheriff of Tombstone. The woman checked her
     list, smiled, waved herthrough. Mom turned toward me with a big grin and gestured for me to follow.
    Inside the building we were ushered to our seats. We sat on long bleachers. Many of the seats had masking tape stuck to the
     backrests with names on them. Our seats had Francine’s last name. The warm-up comic came over and introduced himself to Mom
     and me, chatted about Francine. Mom exchanged jokes and wisecracks with him and he seemed genuinely amused. He even kissed
     her hand. Then, midway through his routine with the studio audience, he introduced my mother to the crowd and he and Mom started
     in doing the same bit as if they’d been rehearsing for years and planned this. The audience thought it was hysterical. She
     was pretty funny, I had to admit. At the end, Mom bowed to the audience and they gave her a big hand.
    After that, the show itself was a bit anticlimactic. Halfway through the taping Roseanne and John Goodman came out and joked
     with the audience about how their diets were making them crazy. Then she pretended to fire him and he put her in a headlock
     and gave her scalp nuggies.
    On the drive home Mom said, “They seem like nice people. Very
real
, don’t you think?”
    The next day we were watching Jenny Jones. We’d already watched Sally, Geraldo, and Jerry Springer. Jenny had people on who
     had been bullied as children and were so traumatized that they’d never gotten over it. Today Jenny was giving them the opportunity
     to confront and tell off those former childhood bullies.
    Mom was munching on a huge tin of popcorn one of my patients had recently sent me, I guess as a consolation gift. I’d gotten
     a lot of gifts since Tim had died, and frankly I’d never known that gift-giving was a part of the protocol if someone died.
     Maybe the idea was to shove as much stuff as quickly as possible into the void the dead personcreated, like stopping up a hole in a dam. Sometimes I laughed when I thought about people discussing what to buy me. What
     do you get for someone whose fiancé blew away five people before being gunned down by the police? A kitten? Tickets to
Roseanne?
Popcorn?
    “You like these shows?” Mom asked.
    I sensed a trap, so I just shrugged. I didn’t want to admit to liking them, though I did. Sometimes Tim and I would watch
     them together and try to guess which of the four most typical comments the outraged audience member would say: (a) “What about
     the children? The children come first”; (b) “Communication is the most important thing”; (c) “You people just have no morals”;
     or (d) “If he were my man, I’d kick his sorry butt right out the door.”
    Mom tilted the can of popcorn toward me, I shook my head. The can was divided into three sections: caramel popcorn, cheddar
     cheese popcorn, and plain popcorn. Mom was alternating between the cheese and caramel, leaving the plain untouched. It’s what
     I usually did and it bothered me to see her doing it, too.
    “You’re skinny, Season,” she said. “That’s no good. Your dad hates it when I get skinny.”
    How would you know? I almost said, but let it pass. I was in a bad mood because Mom had spent all morning pressing me about
     what I was going to do next with my life. It wasn’t just one direct conversation, either, it was a recurrent question that
     she would just tack onto the end of other conversations so it became like a ghost that kept popping up and shouting “Boo!”
     at me.
    “That Jenny Jones looks good. Not fat but heavy in the right places.”
    “She had breast implants, Mom. They went bad and she spent a fortune trying to recover.”
    Mom shrugged, munched a handful of cheese popcorn. “She looks fine