She reaches for my hand as if to give comfort. It reminds me of how, when I was younger, I felt so close to her. She was the one I tearfully ran to with a skinned knee or a bruised ego. She was the one I could always count on for tenderness and understanding. Then something changed and I pulled away. That’s what teenagers do, right? They need to prove they can stand on their own. But now I’m feeling something I never expected — how much I’ve missed having her to confide in. “Like I said, Mom, you’d think that after all that, the divorce thing wouldn’t come as a shock.”

Mom smokes like a lady, holding the cigarette daintily between index and middle fingers, turning her head away and blowing the smoke in a puckered stream. “Unless you simply assumed that life would always go on the way it has.”

“Did you?” I ask.

She gazes off. “I’m not sure what I’ve assumed. I’ve just tried to live day to day and focus on you and Alan.”

“Why didn’t you ever call Dad out on it?”

“Oh, I did, darling. Many times. But by then we had you and Alan, and given Alan’s needs, it didn’t seem plausible for us to separate. So we had the extra bedrooms added and more or less agreed to lead independent lives under the same roof.”

“But what kind of life was that for you?”

Mom picks some dirt off her khakis. “I had you and Alan to raise. And I have my friends, and the theater. My books, my gardens.”

But the separate bedrooms. We may be speaking more openly than we have in years, maybe ever, but I’m a long way away from bringing up the topic of a love life. I mean, she’s my mom, for God’s sake. But she and Dad have slept apart for years. Though . . . leading independent lives? Is it possible that Mom had someone on the side? I mean, she never left the slightest clue. But could you blame her if she had had someone?

“What about now?” I ask. “If you get divorced?”

“I’ll be able to stay here with Alan. . . . And you, too, if it comes to that. Have you decided what you’ll do this fall?”

“I guess it depends on what happens with the induction physical out in San Francisco.”

Mom takes a deep drag of her cigarette. “Still no word?”

I shake my head. I’d been hoping to hear from the Mobe before my friends and I headed upstate to the festival. I guess if we get there and I find it’s weighing on me, I can always hit Arno up for one of his Violet Rushes.