That night, after they went to the rec center and I found out about Steve Fossett, Mom said, “I’m going out.”

I was eating ramen.

Berk was in the street playing with the Johnson girls.

Carlene was nowhere.

“Out?”

Mom was wearing tight jeans and a shimmery shirt.

“What’s that?” I said.

“What?”

“That,” I said, pointing to her shirt.

She looked down. “It’s my blouse.”

“I’ve never seen it.”

She shrugged. “Do you like it?”

I stared at her. Her hair was loose and she had on thick red lipstick.

She looked how I was going to look when I had my first kiss and it made me kind of mad.

“Who you going out with?” I said, ignoring the question.

“Tandi. And Chelsea.”

She fixed her hair in the reflection on the microwave.

“I thought you hated Tandi.”

She sighed. “I don’t hate Tandi. We just had a disagreement.”

It was more than a disagreement though. Everything was normal and then one day they had a fight and Mom wasn’t speaking to her. Tandi even came over and Mom wouldn’t let us open the door.

But now they were going out together.

“Chip is letting Tandi go out?”

Mom looked at me. “Why wouldn’t Chip let Tandi go out?”

I shrugged.

She turned now and faced me.

“Why would you say that? Tandi can do whatever she wants.”

Her face was red and I didn’t know why and I said, “I just meant, I thought Tandi and Chip have date night on Saturdays.”

Mom looked like she didn’t know this.

“They do?”

“Carlene said they do. And that they make out.”

“They make out?”

I nodded. “Carlene said they go on a date and then they come home and make out.”

Mom smiled. Then she turned back to the microwave. “I don’t know what they usually do but she’s going out with me tonight.”

I sat there.

Then Mom said, “Put Berkeley to bed by nine, okay?”

“Where are you going?” I asked.

She looked at me. “I already told you. Out.”

“Out where?”

“Out.”

I tried to imagine my mom out. Out at a bowling alley for laser glow-in-the-dark bowling and she gets a strike and everyone cheers and a man named Carl picks her up and puts her on his shoulders.

Out at Los Hermanos to eat chips and salsa and then someone says, “Sing! Sing! Sing!” because my mom used to be in a band and she used to play the banjo and she’d have gigs that we went to and I thought she was the prettiest woman in the world. Now I didn’t think that as much.

Or more probably, she’d go to Lamars, the pool lounge where I knew Dad went and sometimes Mom.

I hoped they wouldn’t go to Lamars.

What I really wanted was for her to stay home.

To watch the Buttercream Gang with us.

To make caramel popcorn and let me put my head in her lap and then she’d braid my hair.

I wanted her to tell us stories about her grandma’s house, which was way in the country and had horses and stables and a pond where you could swim.

And I could be sad that I never got to go there because she died before I was born and Mom would be sad, too, and we’d be sad together.

I wanted her to not go out with dumb Tandi and whoever else was maybe saying my dad was trash.

She grabbed her keys.

“Go to sleep by eleven,” she said, and then she walked out the door.

~

I went to sleep at twelve thirty on the couch.

I have no idea when she got home.