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always acted as though she were just looking up from a 300 page paperback and the penultimate scene, but of course she would set it aside for you, because you were here and she was glad to see you.
    My mother could only be nice to wrecked men, foreclosed men, men who drank resignation and flirted because it was in their nature not because they had a shred of expectation left. Jack was like that. Jack who ran the laundry service. When Nellie and Angie turned forty in the same summer, he took them both sky diving. My mother said she felt the scenes of her past life flying out the back of her head like a deck of cards turning into an accordion and making terrible noise. Angie said she drifted, she drifted down onto the world like a child choosing to be born.
    By high school, I knew they were lovers, though when I asked my mother she gave me their standard answer for public consumption. We’re business partners . On my way out the door to a rehearsal of the school Christmas pageant, I sassed them and they laughed. See you none-of-my-business partners later . My mother could afford honesty proffered as humor; humor asks no direct questions.
    After Angie began doing the books, the accusations started. My mother suspected Angie of stealing money, sending it to her daughter who was in rehab. If I needed money for my daughter, wouldn’t I ask? Your mother’s so afraid of betrayal, she creates it . I remembered all the anecdotes of my mother’s that used to irk me in the telling. Inconsequential and created for humor as they were, they all told the same tale. The plumber tried to gyp her, the mechanic tried to rip her, the traffic cop tried to bully her—gyp, rip, bully. But none of it happened, oh no, because she was far to clever, she saw it coming, she knew what to do. And if I knew the kind of pressure she was under, running the motel, if I knew.… (And wasn’t it all for my sake in the end?) I sympathized to try to make her rethink it, to try to make her extend benefit of the doubt. But Angie was already packing. Don’t think this makes me happy , my mother said.
    Fuck you , I answered, You don’t want to be happy .
    Rise and shine . I rise all night in my father’s house, like sourdough starter. On top of the refrigerator, there is a cookbook, its binding held together by strapping tape gone yellow. Recipes typed on tracing paper and two tattered newspaper articles fall out. Sherry Party for Museum Patrons by Maggie Nygren, Society Editor and a column entitled Please Make Me a Better Worrier, God: A Woman’s Considerations . The book is full of color photographs, the flat gleaming color of grade school textbooks that makes every subject look like plastic. There’s a chapter devoted to Leftovers that recommends Spaghetti Roll Ups: leftover canned spaghetti rolled up in a thin slice of ham. Yum . My mother has her mother’s cookbooks, pots, pans, and jelly jars. With Angie, we made applesauce. How I loved the old devices—pushing the center of the apple onto the prongs of the peeler and watching the red ribbons spiral downward; or turning the adze shaped blade that pressed the mush through the ricer, and trapped the peels against the sides. With Angie there, my mother could let on to some of her hurts. This is obscene! she said one night, pointing to the chapter called “When He Carves” which included drawings of a pair of thick, stubby hands dancing around all variety of meat cuts. It was ghoulish—distinctly man hands disembodied but carving merrily. I’m going to rip it out , my mother said. Do it , Angie answered, and she did.
    I turn now to a picture of a root cellar with a big bin of potatoes and a sand pit for burying turnips, beets and rutabagas so they won’t freeze. I try to imagine my grandmother in the picture of the root cellar, or in the picture of the kitchen with white steel cupboards and a big pan of bread rolls cooling beneath a sill where