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nodded toward a store with a sign that said Southwestern Fashions. Constanza walked up to a salesgirl. “This is my niece. I know nothing about what kids wear these days. Could you help her get some stuff for school?”
    “Of course,” the young woman said.
    “Great. I’ll go to the hardware store, Jerry, and meet you back here in half an hour at the cash register.”
    Jerry felt panic rise in her. The salesgirl was already battering her with questions. Did she wantjeans? Skirts? T-shirts? Somehow Jerry spotted a skirt rack and walked to it. She started picking out several skirts. The salesgirl got her and stopped asking questions and instead started to give answers. “There are some cute shirts that go with that. And oh, these new pants and blazer are really cool.”
     
    It was when Jerry was trying on the jeans in the dressing room that she realized that never in her life had she tried on clothes in a dressing room alone without her mother. This was new. There was no one saying that this will look “adorable” on you and really meaning it looked exactly like something her mother wore. And of course usually her mother didn’t buy stuff for Jerry in stores. Usually her mother took something of her own and cut it down to fit Jerry.
    Jerry had taken in a pile of jeans, some nice corduroy trousers with a matching blazer, two cropped tops, a couple of shirts, a sweater, three skirts—short skirts that didn’t drag in the dust! She tried on a short skirt first. This looks good, she thought, really good. She turned slowly and watched her reflection in the mirror. She blinked. It was only a split second, but she saw two reflections in themirror—hers in the slim, short, denim skirt and her mother’s in a long flower-print one smiling her sweet, spacey smile. Within the split of that second, it was as if Jerry had fallen into a deep crack in time. The voice came like a wind from a distant canyon.
    “You made a picture of me in that long skirt, sweetie, on the Harley. Remember how careful you were to put on the helmet, and you even drew in my eyelashes? Remember you, me, and Dad on the motorcycle all the time?”
    And then the words stormed silently inside Jerry’s brain. “No, Mom, you don’t remember. It was not ‘all the time.’ Dad left when I was what? Three weeks old, but we always tried to say a month. Remember The Day Hammerhead Left. Now go away.” Jerry stared into the mirror and willed her mother’s reflection away.
     
    There was indeed a time when Jerry loved that story her mother had told her about riding on a Harley when she was two days old, leaving the hospital after she was born. All three of them rode off on the big shiny motorcycle. Therefore Jerry might be the youngest kid ever to have ridden on a HarleyDavidson. That counted for something! In the first grade, when they had to draw a picture and tell the teacher a story about it, Jerry had drawn a picture of a big old Harley—a hog, that’s what the bikers called them—and she had a lady sitting on the back in a pretty dress and a helmet painted with flowers. Wrapped up in blankets was a little baby wearing a little baby helmet. And big eyelashes. Jerry had been one of those kids who never forgot to draw in the eyelashes. She did the whole bit, really. No little round o’s for eyes. Her eyes had irises and pupils. Sometimes she made the lashes spiky and sometimes long and curly and sexy. “But you’ve forgotten the driver, Jerry?” the teacher had said. “Who’s driving the motorcycle?” Silence. “Your dad?” “I guess.” That was in the days when she still talked. She just preferred not to talk about her dad because then she would have to explain how he disappeared three weeks after she was born and how her mother never stopped talking about it. The Day Hammerhead Left—it sounded like a title for a bad movie trying to be an epic. “Why don’t you put in the driver?” the teacher suggested. “Yes, ma’am.” Jerry drew in