All the mother questioners seemed to be in the signing line. “What about your mom?” one asked me point-blank. She looked like a mom—a rather clingy one.

A young woman, who looked too independent and relaxed to be a mother, had written something on the same piece of paper where she’d spelled her name. “Matilda, like the stupid song,” she wrote. “You didn’t answer my question about your mother. I have issues with my mother,” Matilda also wrote.

I gave the mother questioners off-the-cuff answers. No one seemed satisfied with my answers, including Mary Marinelli. “I talk about my mom only when she’s in the audience, and she’s not here tonight”—that was one of my unsatisfying answers. “My mother knows she’s not the mother in my novels”—that was another one that got a lackluster reception, especially from Mary.

“Before we go to Boston, you have to come up with a credible answer to the mother question—it’s not going away,” Mary told me.

“Okay,” I said. I was distracted by someone who kept moving to the back of the line. I know this about book signings: it doesn’t bode well when someone wants to be last in line. She was a tall young woman—attractive, in a forlorn way. Even at a distance, she struck me as a woman who would never be entirely present; wherever she was, she wouldn’t be wholly there. I would look up from the signing table and see her at the end of the line, a head taller than anyone else. The next time I looked up, maybe four or five people were in line behind her, but not for long. When I looked again, she’d moved backward—reclaiming her hopeless but chosen place at the end of the line.

“Who wants to be last in line?” I asked Mary Marinelli.

“I’m keeping my eye on her—she’s the one to watch out for, probably the writer who’s depressed all the time,” Mary said. I hadn’t been married; I didn’t have children. Maybe you need those experiences to understand that a person who pumps her breasts with religious fervor could be the smartest person you know.

Of course that’s who the tall young woman was—a depressed fiction writer, like me. I was thirty-seven. As the signing line got shorter, I had a closer look at the tall young woman. She was taller than I thought, and not as young as she looked at a distance.

“She’s your age, if you ask me—not to mention the depressed part,” Mary said. Nora had circled back to the signing table, now that the end of the line was near.