All this spoken in a raspy monotone with pause for breath. This would be her fourth husband, not counting the fact that she had married one of them twice.

At first Ronny felt only the sinking sensation with which his body greeted all of her life changes. He kicked at a pizza box on the floor. “This is kind of sudden,” he said.

She made a sound of irritation, a cough; she was probably smoking a Pall Mall herself. “Don’t be like that, honey, just be happy for me, can’t you?”

“I just mean you haven’t known him that long, Mama, that’s all. And you’re going to move with him to Las Vegas.”

“That’s not where we’re going to live, it’s too trashy. We’re going to live in Reno.”

“Well,” Ronny said, and a deep sadness swept through.

“I can’t help it,” she said. “He blows my mind. Isn’t that what you say these days?”

“That sounds right. That’s great, Mom, I guess. Who is he?”

“I thought I already told you about him. Maybe not. After I met him at the One Stop he took me to the fair where I was showing my flowers. You know how I do with putting up my plants at the fair. The judges give me three red ribbons and a white one and he come up to me and said, don’t be blue. Because of I didn’t get a blue ribbon. Don’t you think that’s cute?”

“How long have you known him?”

“Four and a half weeks. His name is Rayford Placid. My new name is going to be Thelma Placid. I think that’s nice. Can’t you be happy for your mom?”

Her new name was going to be Thelma Eurene Johnson Mallory Verner Hansome Placid. She had as many surnames as a soap opera heroine. Ronny, who had only one, Mallory, said, “Sure. I guess.”

“I really think this is the one, Ronny.”

“That’s great.” He was being very quiet, not that she would notice.

“Hell, I’m going to be forty next year, I deserve to be happy.” She paused to take a sip from her cup of coffee; the swallow was audible, and Ronny pictured her standing there with her cup in one hand and her makeup mirror in the other, the phone somehow juggled between, cigarette burning in the ashtray on the table beside her. In the tiny trailer kitchenette with her pots of snake plant and lamb’s ears on the windowsill. “Is everything okay, son? Is school going okay?”

He laughed quietly. “Well, no, Mom.” He was feeling a kind of choking in his midsection and had a hard time getting his breath. “I mean, school is fine. Classes are almost over. But now all of a sudden I have to find a place to live and get a job for the summer. This is kind of sudden, that’s all. I was expecting to come home.”

“Honey, you don’t want to live in this trailer one more summer, do you? I already filled up your bedroom with my shoe boxes anyway.”