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“work late.”
    Reveling in his bad-boy image, my fourteen-year-old brother, Joey, was rarely home. It was as if he, too, was granted a divorce. Part of me admired him for his escape-artist absences. When he was missing in action, I didn’t have to worry about him barging in.
    Sometimes “working late” meant that my mom didn’t come home until the sun was about to rise. On those nights, I slept in her bed and waited, often half-awake, listening for the sound of her unlocking the front door. I could hear her, attempting to not make any noise but inevitably bumping up against something, dropping her keys, and muttering a “bad word” as she made her way to the bed.
    The smell of her smoke-saturated clothes, boozy breath and what remained of her stale perfume was all at once revolting and comforting as she lay next to me, a bit too close, in the double bed.
    As I went through the theatrical moves for the umpteenth time, I wondered if tonight would be one of those nights.
    “There’s gonna be a certain party at the station. Satin and lace. I used to call ‘funny face.’” I found one of her slips in the pile of dirty clothes and held it up against me to achieve a sense of verisimilitude, even though my mother’s face was not funny.
    She was in her mid-forties and her beauty had survived, miraculously. Petite (“I would really have been a true beauty had I been taller,” she often stated, as if her height was her life’s curse) and blessed with a face that miraculously belied her hard living, she could still pull off an entrance. Especially if she was walking into one of the dives she frequented—“taverns,” she called them, sanctuaries for the drunken and heartbroken.
    “What are you doing?” she asked, catching me in the mirror. She’d come home a few minutes early. If she saw it, she didn’t mention her slip, which I quickly tossed. “Let’s go to White Castle for dinner,” she said.
    Those cheap dinners at White Castle stand out in my mind as rare times when I had her to myself. The hamburgers, soaked in onions, were miniature, but we could afford to order more than one. I loved her when we were eating out together at White Castle.
    I told her about the train assembly at school and how I felt there was little possibility of anyone other than me being chosen. She was skeptical but promised, if I got “the part,” to take off work and be there for my big moment.

CHAPTER 9                
    “Mike Kearns,” Miss Kohl announced the next day, “will act out the song in front of the rest of you.” My classmates looked at me with a newfound respect—even the ones who had previously belittled me. I had an identity beyond being a sissy. I had evolved into some sort of performance artist (even though my niche had yet to be labeled as such).
    I was anxious to share the news with my mom, but it was one of the nights that she didn’t come home for dinner, or even call with an excuse.
    On those nights, I’d make my own dinner—a can of soup or macaroni and cheese. Sometimes I’d cash in soda bottles to come up with the money to buy my “meal.”
    After many attempts to find her, calling taverns with names I thought I remembered hearing her refer to in half-whispered phone calls, I’d give up and go to sleep. If I would miraculously get her on the phone, she’d speak in a fuzzy voice, promising to be home in “an hour.” It never, not once, happened.
    Eventually I quit believing her.
    Some nights she’d drop me off at a movie theater. “I’ll pick you up at nine,” she’d say, as if she was trying to convince herself.
    Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd were my babysitters. From the pumped-up male competition to the heartless treatment of lepers, I’d immerse myself in every frame of Ben-Hur .
    When she didn’t show up after the first screening, I watched the three-hour movie a second time, constantly jumping up and checking the front of the theater (never when Jeff and Chuck