She shook her head and glanced at her watch. “Get it to go; we should probably start leaving soon.”

I stared at her and decided to pretend I hadn’t heard anything she’d said.

She offered me a big grin. “Ready to go pick up your mother?”

“I don’t think I can tell you how utterly not ready I am for that.”

Bette’s grin grew wider. “Just think, you get to spend four whole days with her.”

“I am not listening.”

“You’ll be roommates.”

“I don’t see what’s so wrong with a ‘Bye, Lenore, here’s your hotel room’. I mean.”

Bette smiled fondly at me. “Sweetie, I hate to break it to you, but she’s your mother.”

“Yeah,” I said bitterly. “Whose idea was that?”

I stalked off toward the counter and ordered twenty espressos and a shotgun. I mean, no, I didn’t, but I just knew that having my mother spend the next four days with me was going to drive me to drink and drive and commit matricide.

I say this out of love. I love her, really.

Most of the time.

Actually, I lied about me and Bette not seeing much of each other after I packed up and moved out of her house. I saw her a few times at Parkland and I did skulk around The Bette Porter Gallery (or as I called it in my head, The Bette) a few times after it opened; whenever we saw each other we did that juvenile thing where we pointedly ignored one another and made sure to look like we were having so much fun with whoever we were with (or, that’s what I was doing, anyway).

And one time, she came and visited me at my mother’s, but that was only after I’d been living there for six or seven weeks.

It took me an hour and a half to drive from Bette’s house to my mother’s condo in Beaumont, and for some reason my mother decided to be a total freak and pretend she was surprised to see me. Like I hadn’t called her the night before and been like, “Mom, I need to stay with you for a few days”!