Mary flashes me a yellow-toothed smile and holds out her hand. “So nice of you. My name’s Mary.”

“So you’ve told me,” I say as I hand over the Clif Bar. “It’s your favorite, Chocolate Chip.”

She rips open the package enthusiastically. “Chocolate Chip’s okay,” she says as she bites deep. “But Crunchy Peanut Butter’s my favorite.”

I laugh and start to excuse myself, but then she jerks her head up and meets my eyes, staring at me with a new kind of clarity. “You look just like my daughter,” she says. “You know her?”

“No,” I say uncertainly. Mary’s so nuts it’s hard to tell if she really does have a daughter or if she’s referring to the raccoon she befriended the other night.

She reaches down into her shirt and pulls out a small, weather-beaten photo, holding it up for my inspection. It’s of a girl several years younger than me standing in front of a fountain in Central Park. She’s fairer than Mary but she has Mary’s reddish-brown hair and broad nose. Feature for feature, this girl and I have nothing in common, but in her expression—in the anger in her eyes—I can definitely see the resemblance between the two of us.

“She don’t talk to me no more,” Mary says. “She says she ain’t got no mama, but I’m her mama, all right. She may not like it, but I’m her mama.”

She looks down at the coloring book in her hands, and for the first time I look at it too. The hues that she always keeps so contained are now spilling recklessly outside the lines. Scribbles of purple, red, and gray scratch over the printed drawings of the happy family, decimating their white-picket-fence world.

“You know what I think?” Mary asks. “I think she forgot who I am.”

Did my mother ever think I forgot about her? Did she think I had erased her from my life?

There are memories that I simply do not want to relive. And there are things I don’t want to acknowledge.

For instance, the similarities between me and Mary’s daughter.

“She remembers,” I finally say as I try to quiet my thoughts. “Every time she looks in the mirror she remembers.”

Mary smiles up at me brightly. “That’s nice! I like that!” She bobs her head up and down as she seems to replay my words in her head. “ ‘Every time she looks in the mirror’ . . . Yeah, that’s real good. I’m Mary, by the way.”

I take a deep breath and excuse myself from the scene, wondering where I can buy her a new coloring book. For reasons I refuse to examine, I feel I owe her that.