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newfound awareness of myself.
    As I re-position the rearview mirror I start violently, for my mother’s face flashes towards me out of the shadows, round and shiny, her green eyes quirked at the inner corners as if she’s worried about something. I’m either so stressed out that I’ve become delirious or my mother’s ghost is actually sitting in the back seat of my car. I notice the white scum of medication that encrusts her downturned mouth, the deep, persistent scowl in her forehead and the hard lines that run downward from her eyes. I hear her slurred words, spoken in a near whisper: “Remember your promise to me, Danny Boy.”
    Then suddenly my mother’s face changes, or that’s when I think I see it change. Although still somewhat pale, her face has become younger and more vigorous, uplifted, like the face that had been hers in the photographs taken before I was born, the face of a young woman who knows that no evil can undo her. For me there has existed between the two faces a mystery I never tried to understand while my mother lived, but now seek to explore, and that sometimes has caused me to hate her.
    Somehow I manage to pull the car to the side of the road and stop, barely able to take my eyes from my mother’s blanched reflection in the mirror. I’m afraid to turn around and look, for fear of what I might see, nothing perhaps, or ...
    As I stare in disbelief, my mother smiles and then laughs softly, such as she had been unable to do in the last few years of her life.
    I shiver, and she’s gone.



5
Sarah
Sunday afternoon, July 27
Coronado Island
    S itting at the computer in my room I google Congressman Frank Rosen. I want to know more about the mystery man, the man in the old photograph. My mom is away, attending the Epstein auction with her closest friend, my godmother, Isadora Blair. Isadora is grande dame of the Island, “the only island there is.” She’s the undisputed leader of my mother’s social set. “The girls” also play tennis once or twice a week.
    I emailed Ashley earlier today but I haven’t gotten a response. I told her that I’d met the mystery man and that my mother’s relationship with him is quite serious. I added that they’re probably getting married before long, and that we are to have dinner with Frank and his two sons this week.
    I open a Wikipedia article about Frank Rosen that says he was born in the City of Boston forty-five years ago. That means he’s three years older than my mom. He’s the U.S. Representative for California’s thirty-seventh congressional district, a member of the Republican Party. Frank was raised in the Boston area and attended North Bennet Street Trade School.
    As I’m reading the article, Manny hops about on my desk, next to the computer screen. “Pay attention to me,” he seems to say.
    Frank’s paternal grandparents, Samuel and Esther Rosen, were murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz during World War Two. They had sent Isaac, their only child, to New York with a Jewish refugee organization because they couldn’t obtain entry visas for the whole family.
    Isaac then lived with an Orthodox family in New York until he found his way to Boston. There he met Amy Murphy, a Catholic, and they married. Isaac went to work in the shipyards, and two years later Frank was born.
    When Frank was thirteen, before he was to be bar mitzvahed, Frank’s father abandoned him and his mother. Frank worked at odd jobs to help support the family, and at sixteen he took a full-time job as a sheet metal worker in the shipyards. A year later, Frank’s mother died of a heart seizure aboard a metro bus.
    The article goes on to tell how Frank married Mary Pettersen, a Catholic, of Norwegian descent. Frank then moved the family from Boston to San Diego, and he took a job with Tycon International Corp. as sheet metal supervisor. Mentored by Al Williams, President and CEO of Tycon International, Frank studied accounting and political science at SDSU in the evenings,