“I like my work. I truly do.” Marissa found herself reflecting her mother’s wryness. “If you and Dad had gone to Finders Keepers before you married we’d have told you there was little chance of your staying together. His preference for men and your insistence on monogamy were guaranteed points of conflict.”

“That was the problem. It wasn’t that he was gay, it was that he’d told me he could live without men. I thought he loved me enough. I thought—” Her mother swirled the empty glass. “I really did love him and it all hurt. He lied because I wouldn’t marry him if he told me the truth. He may have even been afraid I wouldn’t let him see the baby. And he loved being a father. You know that, don’t you?”

Marissa blinked back tears. “Yeah. I know he loved me. I feel it all the time.”

“But you wonder about me. If I love you.”

Marissa frowned at the basket of rolls and crackers the waiter set down between them. Two rolls each and several packets of saltines now tempted her. Hell, she really wanted a drink now. Several drinks and a hot fudge sundae. “You spent a lot of time telling me I was unattractive. That I wasn’t a real girl. That all I needed was a man to take care of me—I didn’t need dreams and ambitions of my own. Here was my mother, who has endless alphabet soup after her name and a respected reputation as an art appraiser, telling me not to follow in her footsteps. How was I supposed to interpret that?”

“That maybe I didn’t want you to make my mistakes?”

“But mother . . . All your advice seemed to be about changing me into you. Clothes and food and college courses—you never stopped pushing me toward all the things that you had done. Like if I joined your sorority I’d wear a size eight and have all the social graces instead of being fat and better talking to machines than people.”

Deep inside, she was still thinking about the idea that her conception had been an inebriated oops. Right now a frothy margarita on the rocks alongside baked brie with honey and almonds on fresh sourdough would be really tasty. How many calories did a saltine have, anyway?

She was losing her mind, this much was clear. Starvation madness, something like that.

Her mother stared at her for the longest time, even when her salad was delivered. The server, perhaps interpreting their silence as ominous, scurried away more quickly than usual.

“You know, Mom, I already didn’t like a lot about myself by the time I was a teenager. You made it abundantly clear you didn’t like me either. So I did the one thing I knew where I could excel—I learned programming. I learned reasoning and statistics and logic-based quantification strategies. I liked that part of me. But I always felt a failure because I couldn’t make you happy. I won’t wear pink with white gloves in the summer for church. That’s just not who I am.”