She wore her hair pulled straight back into a simple silvery bun. Her lethal tan was set off by a man’s white business shirt knotted at the waist over a taut if strangely petrified-looking little tummy. There were muscled bumps my daughters call “a six-pack.” How did she get so much exercise? Then I guessed.

Grace’s khaki shorts looked well worn, seeming as sunbaked as the oiled legs underneath them. Straw sandals with wedge heels lifted her inches taller than I remembered. They showed her calves to full advantage. Her legs looked thirty-eight years old, and even her face not much past fifty-two. (I was not yet forty-six but appeared to be closing fast on a squirish high-cholesterol sixty. None of it would quite compute. Today’s stats seemed a cubist’s.)

Though most of the guys crowding the guardhouse stared down at my lovely nubile daughters or at my coolly handsome wife, Larry and two others remained firmly focused on my mother’s spunky rounded little backside. Some things never change.

Conversationally, my gracious wife, beneficiary of foreign travel and Miss Porter’s training, took up the slack. So did my darling girls, usually fairly quick to laugh. The older woman successfully chatted them up; she stood there, saucy, dark as an Indian princess, ten knuckles on two hips, instructing my daughters, “Here, let me look you two beauties over.” The girls comically spun then pretended to be woozy from three makeshift turns. “Damn gorgeous, the both of you,” Mom said. Our hostess herself acted irksomely perky. She looked browned too often. Crow’s feet bespoke her many seasons fishing while drinking while out somewhere on the ocean yukking it up with a good-times stocks-and-bonds crowd.

This Grace appeared far more direct, funny, and opaque than the girl I recalled. Whatever of her had started as childishly soft as the center of some soft-boiled egg, now looked toughened into an exceptional and pliant leather—the expensive, buttery, Italian kind. You could see she still wielded quite a talent for sass, nerve, the slow-burn romantic leer. You saw how all the oldsters in this hut, shaking their heads over her latest joke, considered her a pistol even now. And I could at least see why. I admitted that and stopped there. But the image of her being drilled by the large animal vet; the face of Clyde screaming a scream that would’ve stunted the growth of Edvard Munch—all that washed back over me here at noon in the Florida heat. All that history still lifted off Mom’s brown body like fumes dancing over fuel.

The words “femme fatale” made odd sense here.

I must’ve looked stricken. I saw so in Bethany’s concerned glance. I was closing on fifty. It was ninety-eight degrees today. And I was busy dealing with this: my mother is among the most attractive women I’ve ever encountered, still definitely something of a turn-on. No fuckin’ fair!