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and hand-crocheted collar and cuffs. She said they went to the church believing Carson’s parents would come, but only my aunt was there to stand up with her. Then there’s the story about Carson’s brother who supposedly came to the motel and tried to seduce my mother. She told me he hung around after dinner, dropping big hints. You must get lonely, a woman like you . She knew he was there to snoop around and if he couldn’t find something, create it, so they could bring charges of unfit mother against her.
    For me, the stories had the strangeness of fairy tales or fables. My illustrated Aesop’s showed a picture of a crane with its beak down a wolf’s throat, dislodging a bone stuck crosswise. When I was seventeen, I got a long look down my mother’s throat. Angie, who had just moved out, helped me find Carson’s parents in the phone book. They told me he had died a year before I was born and offered to show me the death certificate. They were so sorry. Sorry I had a crazy mother? Sorry I wasn’t his kid? I spent the rest of the summer with Angie. When I’m angry, the whole world isn’t enough room for me.
    As a child, I was happy to have two mothers. Angie was my gentle alternative. For as long as Angie lived with us, my mother and I had a truce that held. Later Angie told me things about my mother, and she helped me see how my mother’s stories were metaphorically true, analogous to a memory or feeling she couldn’t or wouldn’t recount to me. My mother will always stand over Carson’s grave with me in her arms asking him to make me his. She will never forgive my grandfather for refusing to love me. She will always be afraid of men.
    I was nine or ten when Angie came along. My mom had put an ad in the paper for a motel maid. Angie walked into the Getaway—kept it short and straight—she hadn’t worked in thirteen years. Angie’s husband had been a football bookie who went crazy slowly. She said that was why she stayed so long. She’d fought leaving him with everything she had. I guess you can only do that once. Her husband had turned paranoid before she left. He tried to persuade her to walk around the house one way while he walked around the other way. Like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. And him with a gun. She made us laugh when she told it, though it wasn’t funny. I think my mother liked her immediately.
    That first Thanksgiving, we ground cranberries by hand, mixed them with orange rind and sugar. The rains came and the tree branches looked like black scratches against the sky and the light from the lamps inside appeared more gold with each day of lengthening darkness. We made sugar cookies for Christmas and stirred marmalade into our tea. If the toilet sang all afternoon out of key, who minded so long as it flushed? The frost bit into the ground and the great spider migration began. Angie would open the door shouting Come all ye spiders! We listened to Old English carols in Alfred Dellar’s clarion tenor voice. Here we come a wassailing upon a midnight clear, love and joy come to you and to you your loved ones too . Yet I watched my mother closely. She would rest her hands from her task—curling the ribbon with the scissor’s edge or twisting tissue paper into roses—and raise her eyes to the window, the sadness in her keening to a sound out of doors, the hard heels pounding in the rain towards our door.
    When I was twelve Angie moved in with us, and I saw my mother in relief, a sharp form against billowy, blowsy, stone-washed Angie with her Tarot cards and her pulp novels. I saw the way my mother sized men up as they walked toward the vacancy sign: not their character but their physical prowess, as much as to say, this one I could out-run, this one I could scare with a little hysteria, this one wouldn’t stop short of a knife blade. After making the assessment, she could afford to be friendly. Angie was always friendly,