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with the chore of watering the self-injurious orchids. While she’s off expanding her search to include other continents, I have to drive seven miles out of my way to tend to the plants. Ten miles if you count the U-turn, which I will.
    Thanks to three profitable divorce settlements and two sizable estates, my mother has a stunning condo on Singer Island with breathtaking views of the Atlantic. It’s a twelve-story building accessible only by decree of the ever present security guards posted on the overly air-conditioned side of double glass doors.
    I parked in a spot marked DELIVERIES ONLY, ALL OTHERS TOWED, got out of my car, then climbed up the polished stone steps. A large, ornate fountain sprayed the walkway with a fine mist. A crew of landscapers were busy changing the flowers. I must admit, it was a practice that didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Routinely, perfectly good plants were dug up, tossed in the back of a truck, and replaced by other plants in different colors. They were plants. Who cared? Someone on the owner’s association had too much time on their hands. They treated the foliage as if it was the important accessory, removed and banished like last year’s out-of-favor fashion item.
    The guard buzzed me in, nodding a general recognition before he made a notation of my arrival on his clipboard as I strode toward the elevator. My heels clicked and echoed against the marble walls of the two-story atrium lobby.
    The elevator always smelled faintly of the vapor trails left by previous riders. I sniffed, recognizing the scent of tuberose, jasmine, and orange blossom blend as Annick Goutal Gardenia Passion.
    My game of guess-that-perfume only got me as far as the fifth floor. I shifted from foot to foot, bored and anx-ious while the elevator slowly rose toward the penthouse.
    Even though my mother wasn’t here, I suffered a moderate failure-as-a-daughter attack. Strange how that happened.
    I could be completely confident in all other areas of life, yet I crumbled when it came to all things “mother.” I had this vision of myself, stepping off her elevator, certain that I had a big neon sign over my head flashing I SUCK! It was a mother-daughter thing. Mothers had this amazing ability to make you feel sixteen and lame even when they were thousands of miles away out at sea. The little telepathic bitch-slap did little to lighten my mood.
    A mood that careened down when I opened the door
    and started counting dead plants. Just for fun, I considered running out and buying chalk, coming back and outlining their little plant bodies, and treating the whole place like a massive botanical crime scene. That would be my idea of fun. My mother would take it as yet another example of my irreverent propensity to treat her disrespectfully.
    So I dropped my purse onto one of three ornate sofas in the living room and moved past the pricey and mostly headless marble statues that had scared me senseless as a child, finally ending up in the kitchen.
    My mother’s penthouse was nearly five-thousand square feet, more than three times the total area of my apartment if I added my parking spot into the equation. Large windows, balconies, and sliding glass doors made you feel as if you were standing in the clouds above the ocean.
    The space was very Mom. The decor was formal, floral, and—I glanced around just to check—organized. In a futile attempt at triage, I filled the copper watering pail and went plant to plant, drizzling water onto hard soil. It wasn’t working. The water just rolled off the caked dirt into the saucers.
    Fortunately, while I suck at plant care, I know people.
    The day after my mother left, I took photographs of the plants on my cell’s camera. A great reference for getting their little plant doppelgängers. It was my backup, a pretty foolproof plant-care system.
    Time for Plan B. Luckily, my mother left the stakes in the pots, identifying each plant by color and variety. I wrote the information on a