_Happiness Garden isn’t one of our favorite places. Mom and I only ever ate here after seeing my pediatrician in the same shopping center. But now her IOP group meets in this building. Her husband Hayes drops her off each morning on his way to work; one of the women in the group gives her a ride home in the afternoons. When she called me yesterday to pick a place, she did not mention these restrictions. “Why don’t you meet me at Happiness Garden?” she said, as if recalling the place fondly. “We haven’t been there in a while.”

I left Oxford early this morning and drove the two and a half hours straight to Jackson. After lunch I will drive straight back. Frida, my sponsor, suggested a short trip would be best, to say what I need to say and be done.

The hostess motions me to a booth. Cracked gallon pails are lined up behind it. The lid is off one, exposing a rag afloat in bleach. I set my spiral notebook on the vinyl beside me, order water and sweet tea. They come in big plastic cups whose red tint obscures the color of their contents. I take a sip from one, taste the bland super-sweetness of the tea. I switch between tea and water until both are half empty. A server arrives with a pitcher in each hand.

“You don’t want to get some food?” she asks, refilling.

She looks down at my bare paper placemat printed with the Chinese zodiac.

"Thank you,” I say. “I’m waiting for someone.”

She smiles as if she doesn’t believe me, and as if her doubt were contagious, I start to worry. Mom sounded stable on the phone, just before Hayes dropped her off at IOP, and I know she’s right around the corner. She still has the BMW, but her license has been revoked. The potential for flight or sabotage is slim. Still, I feel a familiar drift in my gut as the minutes pass. My booth begins to float away from the buffet; the steaming vats and tong-wielding diners slide back; the gold cat by the register pumps me a cheery farewell. Just this morning, Mom told me a friend from her group would be joining us. I look for a second woman, somewhere between forty and sixty. My one prospect, a lady with orange, singed-looking hair, steps into the restaurant alone and joins a balding man and a teenage girl at the next booth down. I call Mom’s cell; the mailbox is full. I hang up and call Frida.

“What if she doesn’t show?”

“She might not,” Frida says flatly. Her receptivity to disappointment and surprise, honed by two decades of sobriety, can be mistaken for apathy.

“I came all the way down here,” I say, picking at the loose binding of my notebook.

“And you’ll have done your part. There’s value in that.”

It takes me a moment to recognize Mom. She looks healthier, but also paler, more fragile. I remember the loose white linen blouse and floor-length black skirt that conspire to hide any sign of weight rapidly gained or lost. Her auburn hair, bunched into unwashed tangles the last time I saw her, is thinned out and trimmed just below her earlobes. The skin of her face settles over the bones like a fresh sheet where the inflammation has gone down. Her eyes flick about the restaurant; her lips part. My just-relieved fear of being stood up is made visible on her face. I am almost ashamed to see it, and am grateful when she sees me waving.

She steps toward me with her hands lightly outstretched. I take long, awkward strides to make up the distance. Her hand clamps on to my wrist and I feel her whole weight pressing behind it, using me for balance.

“Don’t be alarmed by my walk,” she says. “I’m only a week out of a wheelchair.”

I didn’t know she’d been in a wheelchair. “Sorry I took so long,” she goes on. “My IOP is five storefronts down. That might not sound far, but for me right now it is.”

"You’re doing great,” I say, steering her into the seat across from me.

"Thessaly had to stay late; she should be right behind me. Her parents named her Thessaly. Can you believe that? Poor thing. I think you’ll like her."

The server appears at her shoulder. Mom startles, then orders water with lemon.

“You don’t mind that I invited her, do you?”

“Of course not.”

In fact, I did try to work out this development on the drive down. Was Mom afraid to be alone with me? Did she sense the purpose for my visit and wish to thwart it? Had she told this friend unflattering things about me in their group? I quickly revise my mental sketch of this friend. Anyone named Thessaly must be about my age. This sets up a fresh reel of questions.

“It’s so good to see you,” says Mom, shooting out her hand to clasp mine again. “And don’t worry about my hair, either. You remember what a rat’s nest it was. They couldn’t do anything with it at the hospital. It’ll grow back.”

“Oh, for god’s sake,” I say, chuckling. “I don’t care about that. I’m just happy to see you.”

“Me too.” She smiles and settles back in her seat. I unfold the notebook carefully in my lap.

“Maybe while we wait,” I say, “I can talk to you about something.”

From school I’ve learned to chart the rhythms of her alcoholism: the slurred Sunday-afternoon phone calls I leave on speaker while I work on a paper or laundry, mechanically responding to yes-or-no questions, before excusing myself to do what I have been doing already. The nighttime calls I know not to answer, though I can’t help but listen to the voicemails that follow, her voice reedy with indignation. “This is your mother,” she says, thrusting the word at me like a perishable gift I have let spoil. The silences pass in institutional lengths. Thirty days. Sixty days. Ninety. If Christmas or my birthday falls within this hiatus, I will receive an envelope with the return address of a treatment facility, containing some cash and a long letter, sometimes ten pages, the thoughts lucid and sad, the handwriting wild as torn roots.

This time, though, the calls haven’t stopped. When I remarked on this to Frida, she suggested the time might be right to make my amends. I have cursed my mother to her face. I have taken money from her, lied about my reasons for needing money while away at school. I have sneaked out of her husband’s house in the middle of the night and stayed gone for days, culminating in long, exhausting scenes when I decided to come back. All this is scrawled in the pages on my lap, for reference, but I blink at the handwriting as if it were someone else’s.

Mom doesn’t respond. Her eyes move to the door. “There she is.”

Thessaly spots her from the doorway and steps toward us. She’s tall and looks a little older than me, probably twenty-five or twenty-six. Her hair hangs in a heavy brown bob around a face that reminds me of dough rolled out too thin. A shapeless, sashed plaid garment swallows her from collar to ankle, a kimono by way of Glasgow.

“Dr. Choteau kept me late,” she tells Mom, sliding in beside her. “To adjust my meds.”

“Hi!” she says to me. “I’m Thessaly. Your mom’s told me so much about you.”

She winces as she tastes the age-inappropriateness of her words. I wish I could say Mom had told me so much about her, or anything at all.

“Nice to meet you,” I say. The server reappears, by now visibly exasperated to see our placemats bare. Thessaly orders Coke Zero, then, when they don’t have it, hastily amends to Diet Coke.

“I’m trying not to blow up again,” she explains as we stand up, pinching the indeterminate shape of her middle through the plaid. “If it’s not opiates, it’s refined sugar.”

I fall behind her in line for the buffet. “Are you from Jackson originally?” I ask.

“Originally, yes. I went away to college in South Carolina, to study art.” She blows a raspberry to punctuate this life choice. “I came back home for treatment, then stayed to take some art classes at Belhaven.” She stops and looks around with quick jerks of her head, like an owl. “Where’s your mom?”

Mom is still in the booth. Her brow wilts with concentration. Her palms brace against her knees, then the table, neither grip achieving any propulsion. An airlock opens in my gut. I push past Thessaly to help her up.

“Thank you, sweetie,” Mom says, clamping my wrist again. “Don’t worry. Your mother’s not an invalid just yet.”

We orbit the vats in single file, Thessaly in front, me close behind Mom in case she stumbles. She looks helpless in this steaming atmosphere. I want to zip an astronaut’s jumpsuit up her back, shove a helmet over her lopped curls, and blast us home—not to Hayes’s bungalow in Jackson, to which I will return her after lunch, but to the old, long-ago repossessed house in Rankin County where I grew up, before Hayes, when it was just us.

Thessaly beats us to the booth. She sits hunched over her phone, food untouched, typing frantically with one finger. I imagine an accomplice stationed in a parked car around the corner, Thessaly informing him that she has befriended the old lady and is just a few questions away from learning the location of her valuables, provided the son doesn’t cause trouble. I realize with a skipped heartbeat that she has been alone with my notebook, though it hasn’t moved from its place on the seat across from her. She flips her phone face-down on the table when she sees us.

Mom lowers herself back into the seat beside Thessaly, slowly, as if it were a bath. Her plate looks selected by a dietitian, judicious helpings of starch, protein, vegetables: the meal of someone who has had to relearn eating. I am twirling lo mein around my fork when she slides a packet of chopsticks toward me. “Wouldn’t you rather use these?” she says. “More authentic.”

“Thanks,” I say, laughing, “but it’s not like the food is any more authentic than the forks."

Her face sinks. “I know. I just thought...” So often with my mother, I feel as if she has slipped something impossibly delicate under my foot—an endangered bird’s egg, an origami rose—so I have no time to stop myself before I step down and crush it.

“Thank you,” I say again, “that was very thoughtful,” but I keep using my fork.

"How do you like Dr. Choteau?” Thessaly asks Mom, curling confidentially toward her.

Mom frowns, considers the potential for controversy. “I think I like him all right,” she says.

Thessaly bobs her head.

“Me too. I just don’t get why he canceled my amphetamines.” She whispers this last word, as if some amphetamines nearby might hear her.

“That is weird, isn’t it?” says Mom. “Then again, I don’t know much about amphetamines.”

“Maybe it’s because they’re habit-forming,” I say.

They look up at me as if they’d forgotten I was here.

“I have to tell you,” Mom says to me, with a quaver either of confession or indignation, “I’m taking something to help me sleep. My—our—doctor prescribed it for me. It’s not a narcotic, and it’s really helping.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” says Thessaly quickly, as if to intercept my response. “My new meds are helping too. I used to be on nine things; now I’m only on six.”

“That’s wonderful.” Mom pats her on the shoulder, but her eyes stay on me.

Thessaly follows her gaze. “I’m sorry,” she says to me. “This treatment talk must be boring you.”

“Not at all. I’ve been sober for two years.”

Her eyes widen. “Wow. That’s amazing.”

“It is,” says Mom, beaming at me. Her hand is still on Thessaly’s shoulder. “I’m very proud of him.”

“Makes my six weeks look like...” She glances at her plate. “Chop suey.”

Mom turns to her, suddenly fiery. “Six weeks is nothing to scoff at,” she says. “The first thirty days are the hardest.” She turns to me. “Don’t you agree, sweetie?”

“Right,” I say, my face flushing with an unplaceable embarrassment.

Thessaly curls back toward Mom. “Choteau was all cool with me being on Adderall back when I was taking classes,” she says, “but now that I’m taking a semester off, he says I don’t need it anymore.” She rolls her eyes.

“I abused Adderall all through high school,” I say, unable to help myself. “I crushed it up and snorted it before class every morning. One time my nose bled all over a Scantron and the machine couldn’t score it.”

Thessaly makes the motion of smoothing behind her ear an already smoothed-back strand of hair.

“But you didn’t need it,” Mom says to me gently. “You didn’t have ADHD.” 

“Speaking of which,” says Thessaly, “your mom tells me you’re up at Ole Miss studying—oh crap.” She pokes her temple with a chopstick. “Psychology!”

“Philosophy.”

“Right, right, I knew that. Sorry!”

“He’s working on his thesis,” says Mom.

“Neat!” she says. “What’s it about?”

“My research is on conversion narratives.” As I practically recite my thesis from memory, I am aware, without being able to stop myself, of nodding steadily, keeping time with the cat at the register. “I’m looking at the lives of people considered saints, both in religious and secular traditions. I have a section on Mary of Egypt, the ex-prostitute who spent forty-seven years of penance in the desert. There’s another section on Malcolm X.”

“Wow,” says Thessaly. “Those are...very different.”

“But they have a lot in common. I’m interested in how these figures change their moral codes—prostitutes become ascetics, hustlers and addicts become revolutionaries—but retain the qualities that defined them in their past lives: their extremism, their passion, their resourcefulness. Basically, my thesis is that, while people may translate their lives into a new language, they don’t, fundamentally, change.”

The air in here is humid, but Mom shivers. “That’s a pretty scary thought, sweetie.”

“How interesting,” says Thessaly. “I happen to think people change all the time.” She laughs and tosses her head, stuffing her dissent in a bright Easter grass of agreeableness.

“I really am doing better, you know,” Mom cuts in. “I’m not letting people push me around anymore. The other day, in group, I was sharing about something very personal, something that happened to me in college. You know what I’m talking about.”

I look down at my plate. Mom and I have never discussed her rape outright. For years when I was growing up it was this unnamed, shapeshifting horror, something that happened to me, that lived in her sudden blank silences at the dinner table, her jolts at loud noises. Even after I knew everything, pieced together from overheard conversations, we did not speak about it. I simply let her understand that I knew, and ever since she has alluded to it as if to some long conversation between us that never took place.

“Anyway,” she says now, “these two girls were talking the whole time I was sharing. Eventually I stopped and said to the therapist, ‘I feel disrespected.’ The therapist said, ‘Don’t tell me; tell them.’ So I turned to them and said, ‘I feel disrespected.’ They apologized, of course; they had to. But do you know what I said? I said, ‘I accept your apology.’ I didn’t say, ‘That’s all right,’ or, ‘I know you didn’t mean it.’ Because it wasn’t all right! I stood my ground.” She gives me a triumphant look. “Now, that doesn’t sound much like your mother, does it?”

“I’m very happy for you.”

For the first time, Thessaly looks puzzled. “I don’t remember that.”

“You were having a one-on-one with Dr. Choteau,” says Mom.

“Was it Kris and Jackie?” she says. “Those dicks.”

Mom takes a cavalier stab at her broccoli. “It’s all right. I only brought it up to brag on myself.”

But Thessaly’s puzzlement lingers. “Something that happened to you in college?”

Mom bites slowly into the broccoli. “M-hm.” She chews, swallows, glances at me. “I didn’t mean to bring that up. We don’t have to talk about it.”

“That’s okay. You can talk about it.” Thessaly looks at me as if to recruit me to her fascination. She scratches the back of her neck. “You know. If you want to.”

I want to throw my plate and run out into the parking lot, leave them both sitting here all afternoon.

Mom grips the edge of the table. She speaks with a forced steadiness; her words walk a plank. “I was a freshman. I lived in the dorms. One night I was getting out of my car, and...”

I want to intervene, but all I can do is stare at the lone broccoli floret left on her plate. Then I hear myself make a noise: “Ummmmm...” There is no thought behind it, but it does the job. Mom stops speaking; they both look at me. I clear my throat. “Who’s ready for seconds?”

I load my second plate with food I have no intention of eating. I do it quickly, thinking perhaps I can beat Thessaly back to the booth and engage Mom in my amends. When Thessaly makes it back, she will see she has walked in on a deeply personal conversation and will have no choice but to excuse herself for the bathroom or to make a phone call outside. But when I turn away from the heat lamps, Mom and Thessaly are already seated, Mom with nothing, Thessaly with only a sugar donut on a napkin. When I sit down, Thessaly says to Mom, “Tell him how much better you’re doing with Hayes."

Mom gives me a bashful grin. “Hayes got a DUI, you know.”

I strip my face of expression before I answer. 

“Did he?”

“He had to install a breathalyzer in his car,” she says. “He’s always raging about it, but I don’t stick around and listen to it anymore. I call Thessaly, or one of the other girls, and I go to a meeting.”

Hayes was still married when he started seeing my mother; I was ten. On car rides back from his apartment, Mom would fill me in on what my eavesdropping from the pullout sofa had missed: Hayes’s hesitation to leave his wife, his drunken tirades about women and children.

“Do you know what he said to me last night? He said, ‘Being with a woman is like reaching your hand into a barrel of snakes and hoping the one you pull out isn’t venomous.’ ” Her Hayes-voice is that of a cartoon oaf, dopey and deep. It lacks the menace of the real thing. Eventually I started using the voice with her, which made her laugh like few other things did.

“If he talks about her like that, what makes you think he’ll talk about you any differently?” I had asked from the backseat.

“I think that’s very wise, sweetie,” she’d said, forgetting that I was only repeating something I’d heard her say.

“Is he still waking you up at night?” says Thessaly.

Mom addresses her answer to me, like an interview subject looking out at the live audience instead of the interviewer. “Now that I’m sober, I’m in bed by ten. He gets home from the bar at two or three in the morning talking to himself, stinking like scotch. Last night he woke me up falling into bed like a ton of bricks. I screamed; there’s nothing worse for a person with PTSD than to have someone crash into bed like that. So he said, ‘I’m sorry I make you so anxious.’” She still uses the Hayes-voice, though the impression now sounds halfhearted. “And I said, ‘You can’t make me anxious. You don’t have that power over me.’”

“What about the breathalyzer?” I say. “How does he get home?”

A little of her fire goes out. “He takes my car.”

“You’re doing great,” says Thessaly. “Keep showing him you’re worthy of better treatment.”

When we lived with Hayes, I started sneaking out of the house to meet men. I would let myself out to smoke a cigarette and stroll down to the end of the block, where a man would be idling his car waiting for me. Some of these men got me high. Afterward I would climb out of the same car at the same spot and lurch back up the block as if no time at all had passed. Almost always I would find the door unlocked; I knew without having to be told that Hayes had locked it and that Mom had waited for him to fall asleep and then crept out of bed to unlock it again. One night, though, I botched the trick. The man I met drove me not to some unlit cul-de-sac or athletic field but all the way to his apartment out by the reservoir. He was a flight attendant; his eyes were red-rimmed and his place had the spartan, over-bright look of infrequent usage. We snorted speed and fucked. When we had finished, he took a pill, I thought so he could bring himself down enough to drive me home. He offered me one too. I swallowed it without asking what it was—I loved to do that, taking in anything that was offered to me; it was better not to know—and fell into a deathlike sleep. When I woke it was still dark, but the date on my phone had changed; I had slept for a night and a day. My screen was stacked with calls and messages from Mom. Ordinarily this would have seized me with panic, but I still felt greased with the midnight-blue calm of the pill. The man was gone. I called a friend to pick me up and drive me to Hayes’s. I saw Mom’s face hovering by the porch door.

“Where the hell have you been?” she had said, bunching her nightgown at her throat. “We thought you were dead in a ditch somewhere.” She pressed her face close to mine as I mounted the front steps. “Of course he found the door unlocked this morning, so I had to take the fall. I sneak around like a rat for you and you can’t even come home the same night? He wanted to call the police; I had to beg him not to because I didn’t want them to find you smoking dope with some pedophile. You think I don’t know what you’re doing?”

She was so close her damp hair grazed my neck. I smelled her recent shampoo and heard her fear, not fear for me but fear of Hayes, choking her voice to a sharp murmur.

“Fuck you,” I’d said. The words were electric in my mouth, though I knew I was only able to say them because of that dark calm that still protected me. “Fuck him too. You can both go straight to hell.” I shoved her away by the shoulder, this fragile person I had always feared I would shatter, her shrapnel sticking painfully in me. The porch door was unlocked. I knew Hayes would be waiting inside and that he would pound the wall with his fist, scream in my face. Maybe he would even hit me. I was almost thrilled at the possibility, of seeing what I could live through when I didn’t care.

It occurs to me, a bit late it seems, that in our recent phone calls Mom has hardly mentioned Hayes.

“When did he get the DUI?” I can’t help but ask.

“Oh,” says Mom, “not long after I left treatment this last time. So about a month.”

“Right before he retired, right?” says Thessaly.

“Retired?” I ask.

“It was early, but he qualified,” Mom says. “I don’t think he wanted to show weakness at the office.”

“What an asshole,” says Thessaly, then claps a hand over her mouth. “Sorry! I had no right to say that.”

“That’s okay,” says Mom, giggling. “I don’t think he’s offended.”

Thessaly’s hand is still protecting her mouth. If I hadn’t just realized what I had, the falseness of this gesture would probably have made me sick. Undoubtedly Mom has told her I hate Hayes, so the hand is not for my benefit. It is for Mom, who has taught Thessaly her favorite schtick of insulting her husband, then recoiling in mock remorse as if you have just offended her, at which she steps in to lavish permission: no, no, go on, it’s music to her ears. The performance allows her the vicarious pleasure of saying these same things to his face, allows her to imagine leaving. Thessaly plays the part with such clumsy sincerity that I almost fall in love with her on the spot. The hand peels away from her face at last. How many other sordid confidences has Mom shared with her, sparing me? I am almost giddy with the thought. There is so much I no longer want to know about.

Without thinking, I clean my second plate. I look up to see them both beaming at me, the table empty in front of them except for a napkin ringed with grease from Thessaly’s donut.

“I wish I could eat like that,” she says.

“You know, you really should,” says Mom.

_Thessaly hangs back at the register, unsure of whether Mom is going to pay. “Her too,” Mom says to the hostess and points at Thessaly, who startles, though I have not seen her reach for her own purse. Outside we squint under the narrow awning and fumble toward goodbyes.

“It was so nice to meet you,” says Thessaly. She shuffles toward me, cocking her head in my direction. This awkward movement charms me off my guard and I put my arms around her.

“It was nice to meet you too.”

She giggles and pulls away, smoothing her garment with her fingertips. “Thanks,” she says. “I just have a thing. A touching thing. Sorry, I’m a dork.” She takes a few steps backward.

“See you at group tomorrow?” Mom calls after her.

“If I’m still breathing,” says Thessaly, already halfway across the parking lot. She gives a nervous laugh, waves, and turns away. Mom and I stand for a moment in silence, watching her plaid back.

“I hope you don’t mind that I invited her,” says Mom.

“Not at all.”

“She’s a sweet kid. Did she tell you why she quit studying art?”

“No.”

“It’s a sad story. Her focus was on woodcuts. One day she used the scalpel to slit her wrists. She says it was an accident, but no one believes her. I worry about her.”

I could tell her this woman is the last person she should be worried about, the first being herself, but I don’t say anything.

Mom looks suddenly startled. “Wasn’t there something you wanted to tell me?”

Her short hair gleams like thin fire in the afternoon light. I can see a uniformed nurse at the hospital handling its Gordian tangles through gloves, too much hassle to unravel, so out came the shears, while Mom lolled in a chair like a mannequin, too doped to say no.

“It can wait.” I put my hand on her shoulder. “Let me take you home."