“You think you can go through life being careless. You think there’s nothing out there you can’t talk your way out of or maybe just give it the finger. I know you, Miss Juvenile Delinquent.”

“I was never a juvenile delinquent, come on.”

“No, but you wanted to be.”

So maybe she did know me. “What does any of this have to do with sunscreen?”

“You know what, bake yourself like a potato, I don’t care. But women can’t get away with things the way men can. That’s the world we live in.”

We always seemed to get back to this. How women had to fight with one hand tied behind their backs. How we would be held to unfair and unforgiving standards, how we had to play a rigged game. Didn’t I watch the news? Didn’t I see what might be visited on me? On any woman? Hadn’t I been paying attention? Somehow, confusingly, this all filtered down to things like my failure to keep my eyebrows plucked.

You’d think, after all this, she’d be telling me to run the other way from men, all men. But no. Life was about finding a good man (while avoiding the many varieties of bad ones) and using strategy and guile to keep him home at night. It was not exactly a feminist message, as even I, from my one-half unit of study, could recognize. It was more like she saw it as a hopeless fight.

At least my mom liked Aaron, or said she did. “Just don’t get pregnant,” she was always telling me. And I never got tired of putting my hands over my ears when she talked about the pros and cons of different kinds of birth control.

We finished our food, and I cleared our trays and plates. My mom fixed her lipstick and we headed out to the parking lot. I asked her what she was doing tonight and she said she was going to catch up on some shows. “Come on out with us,” I said, meaning it, but sorry as soon as I said it. “There’s a zydeco band. Aaron can take turns dancing with us.”

She shook her head. “I wouldn’t do that to Aaron. He’d be mortified.”

“No he wouldn’t. He’d be up for it. He says I dance like a farmer.”

She stopped to take her car keys out of her purse and looked at me a little sadly. “You know, sometimes we think things are going to last forever, and they just don’t.”

“Yeah, okay.” I leaned in to give her a kiss on the cheek. I’d meant it as a joke. I wish I could live my life so that I didn’t disappoint anyone.