Maybe the Moon

imprinted with flamingos. She kept these finds in a box under the counter, and we’d skulk off to the storeroom with them as soon as I arrived, chortling like buccaneers witha fresh chest of doubloons. While I swathed myself in fabric, clowning shamelessly for my new old fan, Renee would perch on a packing crate and tell me long, convoluted stories about Ham.
    Ham was the guy she lived with, a strapping, redheaded TV repairman whose likeness was captured on the baseball-sized photo button she wore on her purse. His real name was Arden Hamilton, which sounded classy, she thought, but none of his friends ever called him that. As near as I could make out, he spent most of his time on dirt bikes, but Renee was absolutely goofy over him. She fixed him box lunches every morning of the week, and—even more amazingly, I thought—didn’t care who knew it.

    When Mom died I was a wreck. Not only had I lost my best friend and manager, but my dreaded Aunt Edie, Mom’s terminally uptight sister, swooped in from the desert “to take care of all the arrangements.” One of the things she’d hoped to arrange was my expeditious removal to Baker, California—the scene of my bleakest childhood memories. I would need someone to look after me, she said, and she had a perfectly nice Airstream trailer just going to waste behind her house. Why on earth didn’t I sell this run-down little cracker box and return to my hometown, where people still remembered and cared for me?
    The hell of it was, I didn’t have a good answer for that. I did need someone to look after me, though God knows I never would have put it that way. Without someone to drive and manage the loftier household duties, I’d be marooned in no time amid a pile of empty Lean Cuisine boxes. What’s more, none of my friends at the time had the slightest need for a housemate. My best buddy, Jeff, the most likely candidate, was no longer single in the strictest sense of the word, having fallen in love several years earlier with a nurseryman from Silver Lake. The others were either officially married or confirmed loners or already making payments on a mortgage.
    This was very much on my mind when Aunt Edie dropped me off at The Fabric Barn two days after Mom’s death. I was hardly inthe mood for shopping, of course, but I needed something dark and dignified for the funeral, since a black-sequined cocktail dress was the only thing in my wardrobe that even came close. When I told Renee what I required and why, she led me with blank-faced dignity to the storeroom, where she burst into tears, fell to her knees, and flung her arms around me. I didn’t want to rebuff her, certainly, but I had to maintain some degree of control. I knew that once I started blubbering I wouldn’t be able to stop.
    “It’s OK,” I said evenly, patting her shoulder.
    Renee let go of me but stayed on her knees on the cold concrete floor, swiping at her mascara-smeared cheeks with the backs of her hands. I remember thinking, even in the midst of my bridled grief, that she looked like something out of Fellini, some gorgeous bad girl at a shrine, pouring out her sins to the Holy Mother.
    To be honest, I was thrown by her histrionic response. I’d shopped at The Fabric Barn less than half a dozen times, and my relationship with Renee had remained on a friendly but professional level. Now, for the first time, I wondered how she really regarded me—as a valued customer whose mother had just died or as some sort of tragic curiosity, an orphaned freak? Her fandom was one thing, I felt; her pity, quite another.
    “What’ll you do?” she asked.
    “Handle it.”
    This came out sounding cross, so I offered her a smile to soften it, which didn’t seem to work because she looked more desolate than ever and sank back with a sigh onto her big dairymaid haunches. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I know it’s really none of my business.”
    I told her as nicely as possible that I appreciated her concern.
    She wiped her eyes again. “I didn’t mean to get weepy on you.”
    “It’s OK.”
    “Did you expect it?”
    She meant Mom’s death, I realized eventually, so I explained that my family has a history of heart problems.
    “But I mean…you didn’t think…?”
    “No. Not then.”
    Renee shook her head for a moment, then said: “Is it OK if I sit down?”
    “Why wouldn’t it be?”
    She gave me a lopsided, bleary-eyed smile. “I wasn’t sure what people do.”
    “People do all sorts of