My mother stood in front of the bathroom mirror, her face framed by a chest-length mass of brown curls. “Your father leave already?” she asked.

“Yeah.” I nodded, wanting to tell her Dad had said something like, “Thanks for the bagel,” or “Give your mother a kiss for me.” But he never did.

Mom stared into the mirror, twirling a few wisps of hair around her right index finger. Dad may be classically handsome, but Mom is stunning. Her beauty is nearly as effortless as her confidence. Rather than battle the Maryland humidity with gallons of leave-in conditioner and a flat iron, she wears her hair back all the way from Memorial Day through Labor Day. She throws some soap and water on her face, maybe a little powder or moisturizer, and then walks out the door. That’s it.

Unlike mine, her skin is unblemished, the color of Snickerdoodle cookie dough. Her mother, a grandmother long dead who I never met named Cynthia but pronounced “SEEN-cha,” was from Portugal. She’s the only relative either of my parents ever speak of. Neither have siblings, Dad’s parents died when he was young, and Mom’s father ran out on Grandma “SEEN-cha” after she was born. Mom told me not to worry about a little acne, because the darker oily skin on her side of the family didn’t scar or wrinkle with age. “You’ll look beautiful forever,” she routinely assures me.

Beautiful forever? Moms are required to say these kinds of things to their daughters. My style tended to waver between trying too hard and not trying hard enough. I liked both dresses and yoga pants, but little in between.

After Benz broke up with me, the not-trying-hard-enough days tended to outnumber the trying-too-hard ones. Like Mom, I’ve become accustomed to pulling my hair back in a ponytail. Unlike Mom, I come off as more sloppy than carefree. People looked at Mom’s unkempt look and said, “Jennifer, I just have to know, who does your hair?” People looked at me and asked, “Is everything okay, Rosemary?”

It didn’t help that my hair couldn’t make up its mind. In the winter months, I looked like my mother, hair straightened and the color of Maryland mud. By summer’s end, my hair turned straw-gold and frizzy. More like my father’s hair, but not quite.

“Rosemary?” Mom asked.

I was staring at her. “What?”

“Why are you just standing there?’

“Have you seen my favorite jeans?”

Mom looked at me curiously. It was a Monday after all, and I was already dressed in my school uniform. “Jeans?”

“Thinking about going to the movies after school with Joslin,” I clarified.

“Have you tried your hamper?”

“My hamper?”

“Yes, Rosemary.”

“My laundry hamper in my room?”

Mom cocked her head sideways, smirking. “You actually know what a laundry hamper is? That comes as a bit of a surprise to me.”

I smirked right back at her. “You’re funny, Mom.”

“Funny nothing,” she replied. “I counted four wet towels on your floor yesterday.”

I had little leverage with my mother at this point. My bedroom smelled like dirty feet. “Make it six as of about twenty minutes ago.”

Mom chuckled in spite of herself. “Rosemary, if you put your favorite jeans in the hamper, then that’s probably where they still are.”

“You mean you haven’t done any of my laundry since last week?”

“I get confused in my old age. Are we talking about your normal laundry hamper, or the one equipped with a teleportation device that magically transports it to the laundry room without you moving it?”

“If only it were that easy,” I said.

Mom was right of course. My laundry hamper was a problem. Never less than overflowing, its lid stood perpetually half-open in my closet, like a snake trying to choke down an animal twice its size.

Mom winked at me. “Rest assured that your tragic incapacity to do laundry is well-documented.”

“Sorry, Mom, but not all of us have made a pact with the Devil that grants us the mystical power to fold a fitted sheet into a perfect square.”

“Rosemary, you washed reds and whites together, in hot water.”

“It was one load of whites. I was like twelve years old.”

“Fifteen,” Mom said. “You did it just last year. Ruined my favorite white sports bra.”

“Yeah, but I got a free pink sports bra out of the deal.”

My mother and her sports bras stood out in Severna Park, Maryland, a town halfway between Baltimore and Annapolis that was equal parts blue collar and blueblood. For her part, Mom was equal parts good mom and badass. While most of the moms relied on trainers, plastic surgeons, and Keto-friendly meal plans, Mom stayed in shape by hiking for hours at a time in the woods behind our house. We lived just north of Cypress Creek, along which Mom had built herself this wild obstacle course over the years with a moat, rope bridges, swinging vines, and a climbing wall.

Badass or not, Mom never asked me to work out with her because she knew she couldn’t keep up with me. No one could keep up with me if I didn’t want them to.

I tell myself it’s just basic human physiology. I was a competitive gymnast when I was little, and in terms of strength-to-weight ratio, pre-teen girl gymnasts are proportionately the strongest athletes on the planet. I was the perfect storm of desire and athleticism. That plus I was old for my grade. Mom held me back in kindergarten. Last spring, I turned sixteen when most freshman were turning fifteen. I might be the only licensed driver in the entire American Martyr sophomore class.

The thing is though, I never really lost that edge. Even after my classmates caught up with me visibly, I was still faster and stronger than everyone. I continued to pull my punches—not running as fast as I knew I could run, not hitting the bullseye in archery class when I could hit it every time, not doing more push-ups and pull-ups than anyone, girl or boy, at American Martyr Preparatory School.

Who was I kidding? Mom could keep up with me. I just didn’t work out with her because of the snakes.

Mom claimed she almost died from a snake bite as a child, which is why I was deathly afraid of them and why Mom never ventured into the woods without her trusty dandelion weeder—a three-foot-long wooden rod ending in a forked metal blade. After her workouts, Mom obsessively prowls the undergrowth, decapitating Copperheads and Timber rattlers with extreme prejudice. Like I said, badass. Not all snakes had reason to fear my mother, and she was careful to teach me which ones were non-venomous, like the Red Bellied water snakes and the Northern water snakes found along the creek beds, or the Black rat snakes and Eastern garter snakes in our garden. It wasn’t a big garden—tomatoes and cucumbers, some herbs, the stuff that was easiest to grow—but the snakes seemed to like it.

Living close to the creek, we drop traps stuffed with chicken necks into the water and pull out blue crabs as big as our dinner plates. Mom and I paddle our canoe into the Magothy River and spend our summer days tanning on Manhattan Beach. Autumn has us picking apples from the abandoned creekside orchard for Mom’s pies and our neighbor Hector’s apple-infused moonshine. Come winter, the creek freezes over just enough to dare Hector, drunk on moonshine, to run across. He falls through the ice almost every time.

The day before had been a good Sunday at the beach. Unseasonably warm. Felt more like mid-summer than early fall. It hadn’t rained in weeks, so the winding ribbon of brackish water connecting the North Cypress Branch stream bed to Cypress Creek had dried up into a green-brown wisp. Mom and I walked the canoe for the length of the stream bed, and then once we paddled out into the main Cypress Creek channel and into the Magothy, we ran into a bit of chop. But we managed.

Benz and I broke up a little less than three weeks ago. Mom kept trying to talk about it with me, but I shut her down. She always took advantage of these opportunities when we were stranded alone to try to gain intel on my personal life—like on drives to the doctor’s office or the all-too-frequent occasions that Dad worked late and missed dinner. We would’ve stayed out even longer, but a security guard for the Manhattan Beach Homeowners Association kicked us off the beach. “Private property!” he shouted at us. “You can’t just paddle up here like you own the place.” Mom flipped him off as we paddled away.

Mom and I have always been “chuckaboos,” a term we Bansons use to describe good friends. But lately, telling her everything about everybody had become just too weird for me. It was as if we both just woke up one day and chose to be occasional strangers to one another. Much of the time it was harmless—an inappropriate comment here or there that would be met with an eye roll. Other times it was not so harmless, like when the neighborhood wives invited her over for Bunco night. My life became theirs—that story I told Mom in confidence about my latest drama with Benz dropped casually in between rolls of Bunco dice. There were many things I would call my life, but “casual” wasn’t one of them.

Kind of like right now.

“I’m thinking about getting a tattoo like yours,” Mom said.

I had a rose vine tattooed on my right forearm the day after Benz broke up with me. An Annapolis tattoo parlor by the Naval Academy never checked IDs to see if you were eighteen. Two red roses bloomed about halfway between my wrist and elbow, nestled among a dark green tangle of leaves and thorns. The tattoo was above-average in size—something a little more substantial than your basic “spring break mistake” a tequila-fueled sorority girl gets stamped on her ankle. But I reassured my mother by saying it wasn’t noticeable if I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt.

A tattoo was reasonably on-brand for me, boyfriend or no boyfriend. I defied authority with a semi-casual regularity. Just enough to notice, but not enough to get me into any kind of real trouble. I rotated my arm as I looked in Mom’s bathroom mirror, the vanity lights picking up the red of the rose’s petals. “Are you mocking me?” I asked.

“Mocking you?” Mom said. “I’m supporting you, Rosemary. You have a tattoo, now I’ll get one. Screw Ebenezer!”

“Literally nobody calls him that, Mom.” Still admiring my ink in the mirror, I yanked a black corded hairband off my opposite wrist. I pulled and tucked my hair into a loose bun, wrapping the hairband three times around its base. “I’ve heard a few of his teammates call him Coker, but that’s about it.”

My ex-boyfriend’s name is Benz Cooke. Ebenezer is an old family name. Benz’s dad, also an Ebenezer, goes by Eben.

Mom wasn’t giving up. “What can I do to help get you out of this funk?”

“Who’s in a funk?” I countered. “How about we just forget about Benz? I’m fine, and I sure as hell don’t need you to permanently engrave something in your skin all in the name of mother-daughter solidarity.”

“Maybe Benz just had cold feet?” Mom speculated.

Mom saw me at my worst after Benz broke up with me. I cried myself to sleep for several nights. You would think this memory would override her memory of Benz’s habitual smile—his “gigglemug” as Mom and I call it—his way of comfortably talking to everyone, even grownups. But she didn’t know the truth about Benz, about us. She didn’t know I was no longer a virgin.

“Cold feet?” I said. “It’s not like Benz left me at the altar. I was dumped by my high school boyfriend. It happens to a lot of girls. We get over it and move on.”

If I said it enough times, maybe I would start believing it. But for now, the only person I needed to convince was my mother. The last thing she needed to know was that my heart was broken.

Broken was maybe a bit of an exaggeration. But a battered heart? Most certainly. Less certain was Mom’s role in mending it. Welcome to bunco night, Jennifer. Shut up and roll the dice.