It was also disquieting that I could have answered the question by telling the audience what my mom had already said about the novel, but I didn’t want to—especially not with Nora in the audience. “I know this mother isn’t me, sweetie, but what does Nora think about it?” my mom had asked me.

“Nora is okay about it—Nora knows it’s fiction,” I told my mother.

“You know Nora would never choose to have a child, Nora would never be a mother, but someone might really kill Nora, sweetie,” my mom told me.

“I know—that may be why I wrote the novel,” I told my mother. But that wasn’t the audience’s business, I decided; I wouldn’t answer any of the mother questions onstage.

Everything went all right, considering. When I was reading, I could easily locate Nora and Em in the audience; they were sitting in the front row, next to Mary Marinelli and her breast-pumping paraphernalia.

I had fun with the Q and A. When there are written questions, you can think of an imaginary notecard—you can make up a question. No one will know, I thought. But back in the greenroom, where I was given a brief reprieve before the book signing, Mary not only knew the question I made up to ask myself; she chided me for ducking the mother questions. “It wouldn’t have killed you to answer one mother question—you can’t write a novel about such an inflammatory mother, and not expect readers to be curious about your mother, Adam,” Mary told me, before going to the washroom to milk herself.

Fred had refrained from comment, but he was at his pissiest when he informed us that Nora and Em were “staking out” the area of the lobby where the book signing was—“in case the bed-shitter shows up.”

I was relieved to learn that, in Nora and Em’s estimation, Jasmine was nowhere in sight. I’d been imagining that Nora and Em had thrown Jasmine into the traffic on Lexington Avenue. At the book signing, I was further reassured by Em’s pantomimic gestures from the back of the signing line; it was easy to see, from the way Em was prancing around, that there was no sign of the subway-station pussy in the signing line. And Nora interrupted her stakeout of the lobby area to have a word with me at the signing table. “The bed-shitter isn’t coming tonight, kiddo,” Nora assured me.

Mary Marinelli was bossing around my readers in the signing line. “He’s not signing T-shirts, or bras, or anything like that,” I could hear her saying. People who wanted their books “personalized” were instructed to write out their names. “Don’t expect him to know how to spell your name,” I heard Mary say.