Touched by an Alien

know, either.”
    “You haven’t told Dad?” I was shocked to my core. As far as I knew, my parents had no secrets from each other. And now, here was my mother, Mrs. Rambo, and Dad had no idea.
    Martini leaned forward and offered his hand. “Jeff Martini. I plan to marry your daughter.”
    Mom laughed as she shook his hand. “Angela Katt. I want the write up of your full financial portfolio and family tree.”
    Martini grinned. “No worries, have it all ready.” He looked at me. “See? Your mother likes me.”
    “My mother’s apparently trained to take on the Terminator. Right now, her liking you doessn’t carry the same weight it usually does.”
    Mom rolled her eyes. “Kitty, stop being so dramatic. All parents have secrets from their children.”
    “You’re packing heat! And you’re a federal officer! I don’t call those secrets, I call those lies.”
    “I can give her the Reader’s Digest version if you want,” Reader called out. “I read your whole file.”
    “Go for it,” Mom said. “I don’t find looking back all that interesting.”
    Reader laughed. “Fine. Okay, at sixteen, your mother was on a school trip to Washington, D.C. During an excursion, she heard another girl being attacked, so your mom went and saved this girl from being raped.”
    Mom shook her head. “No one else, men included, were doing anything. It was the middle of the day, and she was screaming for help. It wasn’t a hard choice.”
    “This girl turned out to be the daughter of a senator,” Reader went on. “Needless to say, the whole family was grateful, the senator to the point that he took a fatherly interest in your mother’s career. He sent her to college, provided training, was her patron, really.”
    “He was a great man,” Mom said fondly. “I still miss him.”
    Recognition hit. “Are you talking about Grandpa Roger?”
    Mom smiled. “One and the same. He was like a second father to me, and it meant so much to him that you considered him family.”
    “So Aunt Emily is the daughter you saved?”
    She nodded. “Why do you think she always wanted you to take self-defense classes?”
    I had to let this sink in. I’d known Grandpa Roger, Aunt Emily, and the rest of their family weren’t really blood relations. But Emily was my mother’s best friend, even though they lived across the country from each other, and never once had anyone shared that Grandpa Roger had been in politics. They’d never really talked about how they met, either, and I’d never seen them all that often growing up, though they’d always sent great presents at my birthday. The why for all of this was a real revelation, though.
    Reader went on. “In addition to other pursuits, your mother is possibly the only non-Israeli, non-Jew who’s been a member of the Mossad.”
    “You’re in the Mossad?” I managed not to scream this question out. My mother was in the Israeli Intelligence Agency? How had that happened?
    “Was. How do you think I met your father?”
    “Dad was in the Mossad!?” This seemed completely impossible.
    “Oh, no,” Mom laughed. “He was on a trip to Israel, though, when we met.”
    This story I knew. They’d met at a café in Tel Aviv. Dad had been impressed that someone who wasn’t Jewish was living in Israel, Mom had thought Dad was really handsome, the rest was history. But I wanted the details now.
    “So, how’d you meet him, really?”
    “At the café, just as we’ve told you. Only, I was following him for his protection. He was there with a college group that was marked for attack by one of the many terrorist factions in the Middle East. Jewish-American graduate students, it was like waving a red flag in front of bulls.”
    “And he didn’t know?”
    “Well, he figured it out when the bullets started flying,” Mom said casually, as if this were a normal courtship tale. “He thought it was sexy,” she added with the smile she always had whenever she was thinking about Dad in a romantic way.
    “Ugh. I think it’s unreal. So then what?”
    “Then she supposedly retired and started work as a consultant,” Reader supplied. “Only, retired applied to being an active agent for the Mossad. In reality, she went to work for the American government in an antiterrorist organization.”
    “You work for the C.I.A.?” I wondered whether there was anything I actually knew about my mother.
    She laughed again. “No. It’s a smaller organization, reporting directly to the White House. We