“What?! I can’t come and visit my daughter?” Sharon asked overly innocently.

“Mom, most people, when they go visiting, leave when the person that they’re visiting isn’t home.” Dana hadn’t yet told her mother about her break up with Alice. So in her mind Dana’s was desperately trying to come up with an excuse for where all of her furniture had gone.

“Well, Dana I’m your mother and I just wanted to come in and see how you were doing.” Sharon had turned back to what she was doing.

“Mom, I wasn’t home,” Dana began as if she were talking to a small child. “How were you going to see how I was.” Dana knew it was coming, but was trying to delay the question as long as possible.

“Honestly, Dana, a mother can tell how her child is just by looking at the surroundings that she is living in. So I just wanted to come in and check to make sure that you girls were taking care of yourselves. And by the looks of the food in here, I can see that you’re not. So I went and bought some groceries and I was going to leave a note for you to call me. Since you have somehow forgotten that you have parents.”

“I’m sorry I haven’t called, mom.” Dana apologized to her mother.

“It’s fine, dear. I’m just putting these away and then I have to be going. I have an appointment that I can not miss.” Dana frowned at the guilty feeling that her mother always left her with. She hadn’t shut her out for the past few months on purpose, she simply knew that she wasn’t ready for her mother to know that Alice was gone. Dana knew that she wouldn’t understand what Dana was going through and that she would undoubtedly start setting her up on dates again. Dana remembered when she had told them about Alice. And even though her mother had, thanks to Tonya, reluctantly accepted that Dana was a homosexual as she had put it, she had always believed that Dana was simply settling for Alice. Her mother was convinced that she could do better. So when she and Alice had first started dating her mother had still been setting her up on dates with women that she found more suitable for Dana. She remembered how red Alice’s face had gotten when her mother had told her about one of these dates with Alice standing right beside her girlfriend.