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life than I’d given them credit for.
    “Hi, Mom,” I sighed.

CHAPTER FOUR

YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP
    I was never so relieved to have a mother with a laissez-faire approach to parenting. A more analytical model might have read into my statement and said, “Who’s dead? Some
guy
? Some
old
guy? Some old
married
guy? Shame on you! If that’s the kind of person you’ve been running around with, then you’d better pack your things and catch the next flight home, young lady!”
    Or perhaps no mother could lay claim to such formidable powers of extrapolation. Even so, I felt a familiar pang of wistfulness for a more nurturing childhood when she happily shifted gears after the most amorphous of explanations:
    “Sorry, Mom. Thought you were someone else.”
    “Well, I should certainly hope so! Now, I wanted to wrap up some loose ends regarding your father’s birthday celebration.”
    What Lucinda Mayo lacked in parenting skills, she made up for in wifely devotion. The party was slated for April 1, and it was only the second week of November.
    “Don’t you think five months is a little early to—”
    “It’s his centennial!”
    “I think it’s more accurately referred to as a centenary.” I was fairlysure both terms were equally acceptable, but my brain seemed to be hardwired for passive aggression when dealing with my mother.
    “Fine. Your father’s one-hundredth birthday—how’s that? Land sakes, you and your twenty-dollar words!”
    Land sakes?
I silently repeated, rolling my eyes skyward. Ever since she and my father retired down south, my mother’s expressions have become increasingly antebellum, even though she’s originally from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and Florida is hardly the heart of Dixie. What would she come out with next? “My stars”? “Saints preserve us”?
    “I’ve been thinking your father might enjoy having all his children in attendance,” she went on. “But I thought I’d consult you first.”
    This was a surprise. Anything—or anyone—associated with either of the first two Mrs. Mayos gave her pause. Despite forty-three years of marriage, she still paced in the kitchen every time “one of your father’s sons” gave him a call.
    “That’s your decision,” I said. “I’ve never even met those guys.” I was telling a half-truth about my half brothers—literally. I’d never laid eyes on Jeffrey (“Jeffer,” in family parlance), the product of my father’s second marriage, who was in his mid-fifties and sold real estate in Southern California. Tom, Jr. (“Tom-Tom”), the offspring from Dad’s initial union, was a fine-art dealer who had just celebrated his seventieth birthday, lived in high style on the Upper East Side, and was one of my favorite people in the world—a fact I’d always assumed my mother was better off not knowing.
    “Don’t you think you’d feel a little strange having them there?” I said. “Especially Tom-Tom. I mean, isn’t he two years older than you?”
    “Great day in the morning! If that was the sort of thing I spent my time fretting about, I never would have married the Commodore in the first place!”
    I declined to point out that fretting about exactly that sort of thing took up more of her time than tennis and Sudoku combined.
    “Tell you what,” I said. “You call Jeffer, and I’ll sound out Tom-Tom.”
    “Aren’t you sweet! You’d do that for me?”
    “Why not? His number’s been in my address book for decades by now. This is as good a time as any to get acquainted. I’ll let you know how it goes in a day or so—tell Dad I say hi.”
    “I’m sure he says hi back!”
    I was sure he did, too, but I couldn’t help thinking it would have been nice for him to actually get on the phone and speak the word once in a while, and not just on Christmas and my birthday.
    Not that he didn’t love me. Of course he did. He’d fed and sheltered me and sent me to camp and college. He’d given my senior prom date the evil