The summer of the gas crisis of 1975, it was my job to pick up customers at the airport so they wouldn’t cancel their reservations when they saw cheaper places to stay than at my mother’s motel. Vacancy signs flourished and motels like ours were in a price war offering everything from free barbecues to dirty movies. Cassie had the aura of a flawed survivor so I felt an immediate affinity. Maybe it was the old-fashioned haircut on her son, Tommy, as if someone had stuck a bowl on his head and cut around the edges like that little Buster Brown who used to live in my shoes. His hand was firmly planted on a purple azalea on the butt end of his mother’s Hawaiian-style sarong. Tommy was about the same age as my own son, Sean, who had yet to be entered in kindergarten.

“I koon’t wait to get here. I’ve never been out of Ohio before,” said Cassie, smiling so that I could see that her eyeteeth needed to be filed. I always got a kick how she would pronounce “couldn’t.” It doesn’t take much to amuse me, I guess. When she reached to grab her beat-up luggage from the conveyor belt, the hair running down her back parted, revealing nickel-sized boils. I had had wicked bad acne as a kid and thought I would go to my grave with pimples. I thought about my funeral a lot. Depression will do that when you’re young and poor with no use for pity and condescension. I asked if they didn’t have tetracycline in Ohio.

“My aunt had boils and so did my grandmother,” Cassie answered, tossing that mane of hair, imperiously. She wasn’t trashy-looking, loaded with sleazy too blue goop on her eyelids. She wore just the right amount of makeup. “Boils are hereditary in my family.”

“Stress,” I muttered, leading the way through the terminal. “If a shrink can’t figure you out in fifteen minutes, he’s wasting your time.” I was pretty opinionated, expert that I was on pimples and shrinks. I had yet to learn impulse control. And as far as stress was concerned, it could well have been my middle name. I was born with stress. Seemed there never was a respite. The motel was one step from foreclosure.

Cassie’s boyfriend had paid in advance for their room and booked them on a cheap midnight flight. Poor Tommy, in tow, was having a hard time keeping his eyes open. I piled them into my Bugatti, one of those home-made jobs with a Volkswagen engine, unsafe at any speed over forty. It had a leather strap across the nose and an imitation teak interior made of contact paper. People judging me by the car thought I was rich. It created a stir whenever I pulled up and I liked the attention. Better than wrapping a snake around your neck, anyway, like some people in Florida do.

With the wind in my hair and barefoot, I could imagine myself some kind of free spirit, despite the fact my husband was having me followed. Back then, divorces didn’t come easy. Infidelity had to be proven. It was okay for men to have a live-in, but not mothers. Both my husband and I were on our third lawyers, but I had my sights set on collecting his social security in my old age and you had to be married for 10 years to get it. Even if it meant keeping my legs crossed until the time ran out, the money would be worth it. My ex was a millionaire. My life wasn’t worth two dead flies. Meanwhile, let the worm squirm!

The Bugatti puttered across the causeway separating us from the mainland. In the day, the panorama of Tampa Bay would take your breath away, but at night, the water was smooth as obsidian, a lure for potential suicides. Yes, I’d thought about killing myself, offing myself in some melodramatic way, but the impulse would pass when I thought of someone else raising my son. Call me anal-retentive. I never claimed to be perfect. Something about me must have invited confessions. Either that or people have a need to be known. Cassie whipped out a picture of her triple-chinned, beady-eyed boyfriend, a pasty-faced redhead, twice her age, as I was trying to concentrate on the road.

“He’s rich,” she said, “with three little kids and a stable full of horses. We live in an eight room mansion and he pays me a hundred and fifty dollars a week.”

“If you want to be a whore, as pretty as you are, you could make a hundred and fifty a night!”

Cassie didn’t seem insulted. My kind of girl, unpretentious. Neither of us had ever met a whore, for a fact, but we sure knew what their job was. Even in a place like Ohio, whores must have been kept busy. “The kids are brats,” she conceded. “They all leave for school at different times. My boyfriend’s up at dawn and wants fresh Danish made from scratch. For dinner it’s gourmet. In my spare time I have to muck out the stalls.”

“I suppose he’s offered to marry you?”

“Not exactly, but he did give me a mink for Christmas.”

If I sounded a bit cynical, I spoke with authority and Cassie listened, patrician jaw outthrust. I’d been provident enough to have a child while still legally married, but her mother had disowned Cassie when she got pregnant. She had as little to do with her mother as she could and even less with the used-car salesman father who’d abandoned them, she said. Her mother had flipped in and out of insane asylums, but Cassie finished high school despite being preggers, carrying Tommy, after he was born, as long as he wasn’t complaining, into a darkroom to develop pictures. The housekeeper job was only the second one she’d ever held.

At the motel, Cassie stripped Tommy of his clothes, letting him sleep in his underwear, unpacking a hoard of perfume bottles and neatly folded T-shirts. Her room wasn’t fancy, but it was clean. I went into my efficiency next to the office and got some alcohol to swab Cassie’s back. When I was done, Cassie handed me a bottle of Frangipani perfume. “Just a little something I picked up for you at the airport. You’ve been so nice.”

Nice was not what I wanted to be. In my dreams, I rode Harley Davidsons naked and robbed 7-11’s. If ever I got cancer there were certain people I was taking with me, from the mechanic who charged me twice for an air conditioner, to the judge who’d agreed with the guy I’d sued in small claims, about a disputed set of andirons when I’d sold my house. This futuristic hit list was growing exponentially the longer I lived, but while I was under surveillance, I intended to be Mrs. Milquetoast and better than good.

The following morning, Tommy and Sean, were splashing in the pool, such fast friends that Cassie didn’t have the heart not to bring them both to Bush Gardens and Disney World, a few short hours away. Every night, Cassie would return, park the rental car, laden with presents, and we would spend the night talking. Everything I had was tied up in the motel. I couldn’t leave during the day, even for an ice cream cone, or someone was bound to drive up and inquire about rates. Mom had had a fight with her partner over what color to paint the walls, so I lent her money from the sale of my house to buy him out. I wasn’t going to charge her the same vigorish I did others. Whatever she felt was fair. Not even a promissory note.

Sheets, sent out to some Mafia-connected laundry, were costing us twenty-two cents apiece. Trash and water bills had driven my mother to the edge. While it was her fondest hope that I would latch onto some sucker, get married again, she lay awake at night worrying about paternity suits. Craig, my younger brother, had always been her favorite despite his predilection for escorting tourist daughters on lonely stretches of moonlit beaches. Instead of checks, our mailbox was always full of teenage lust letters from every state in the union.

Mom was a Born-Again fanatic who let everyone sign Mr. And Mrs. as long as they didn’t ask for fresh sheets. People got a discount if they were only staying an hour. When we had moaners, Mom would turn a deaf ear. She lived in a waterfront house, but never came around unless it was to collect the cash or sniff the air for marijuana. My penance for marrying someone she hadn’t approved of: 18 toilets and 18 baths to clean, acquiring an abstemious repugnance for pubic hairs, humility being beyond my ken.

When Cassie’s vacation was over, we hugged and kissed as if we’d never see each other again. “Pack your bags and tell your millionaire what to do with his mink,” I advised. My mind was already working on a better job for her, no boffing the boss, and without all that fresh Danish business. One week with me, and Cassie had built up some righteous indignation, wanting more out of life than a roof over her head and three squares a day. I should have been a union organizer!

Still, she was surprised when I called. Kurt, who lived across the street from us at the La Playa, was eight years old. His father was always on the road servicing slot machines. A succession of housekeepers had left the child emotionally stunted. Sean could read and write better than Kurt, who was four years older.

“He’ll pay you twice as much as you’re getting now, Cassie. And the best part is we’ll be within hollering distance. Anyone in their right mind would rather live on the beach side of Gulf Boulevard than a farm in the middle of nowhere.”

That wasn’t the whole story. The La Playa had cockroaches as big as an index finger. The plumbing was bad and every drunk in town had a key to Kurt’s apartment because his father didn’t like his friends driving drunk. Dope dealers, rednecks and construction workers populated the La Playa. Everyone had come to get away from someplace else and most of them didn’t have the money to get back. There was a bar on the first floor, and on most Saturday nights, after closing time, you could hear the crashing of glass hitting the sidewalks from a lady on the second floor whose live-in loved to break windows. The wail of sirens, the local color, was better left untold.

“Give me a minute to make up my mind,” said Cassie.

“Kurt is a darling child, blond, with blue eyes, grateful if you just throw him a cookie. All he needs is love.”

“Okay,” said Cassie, a few seconds later. “Isn’t that what we all need?”

Kurt rallied under the power of love that was Cassie. Within a few short months, there was talk among his teachers of double promoting him on probationary status. He quit eating paste and we bought a puppy named Toke and a baby chicken, named Sam, who followed me, cheeping, as I made beds and folded towels. I had never been happier. But Cassie grew weary of never knowing who would show up in the morning on the living room couch, leery of dope deals in the bathroom when Kurt’s father was home. When someone stole the Thanksgiving turkey right out of the oven, Cassie and Tommy moved into my efficiency. The two-foot tall refrigerator always needed defrosting. The drapes were sun-bleached and there wasn’t hardly space to turn around in. Though we worried about warping our kids for life, sleeping with them in single beds, the way we did, it never crossed our minds to let them sleep on the floor. My child support would only stretch so far and though Cassie did as much work as I did, Mom said she couldn’t afford to pay her. She wouldn’t pay me, either, the tightwad. It’s a wise child who knows her own mother. I should have driven a harder bargain, but she was my mother and she had always terrified me. Slightly smutty stuff like True Confessions would have to be hidden under the mattress like the poem I’d copied in grade school: cocktails, ginger ale, five cents a glass…if you don’t know what to do with it, shove it up your…Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies…

Cassie and I shared everything; no secrets between us, no responsibility mine alone. Each boy got swatted judiciously with a hairbrush whenever needed. In a motel, there are a thousand places little fingers don’t belong, the petty cash, for example, and the slot to the pop machine. As the season came upon us, we kept the kids busy, picking cigarette butts out of the sand-filled ashtrays and delivering toilet paper to the guests.

Cassie couldn’t resist the best cuts of meat. I’d be at the check-out counter, talking about the weather, and Cassie, pretending she’d come along to carry the groceries, would plunk down a quarter for a Coke, and walk out as calm as you please, cold cuts under her arm pits, juggling that night’s roast between her thighs. Since she did most of the shopping, I didn’t get wise until I caught her in a drug store, palming crayons for the kids, who were deeply engrossed in the funny books.

“Real smart, Cassie. For two boxes of crayons, we could lose our kids.” Those private detectives were just waiting for a whiff of scandal. I could feel their telephoto lenses beaming in on my cleavage. My husband had enough money to pay for round the clock surveillance and I’d become paranoid enough to think that maybe Cassie had been sent just to set me up, ease her way into my life, then spill her guts.

“I can’t seem to help myself,” said Cassie, paling a bit behind her tan, slightly shame-faced. “I’m a kleptomaniac. Besides, it’s not fair for you to be carrying the whole load. I feel like such a mooch.”

The evil eye of the store’s security mirror caught my glance as I clamped my fingers around her wrist, slipping the crayons with one easy motion onto the rack. It was hard for me to be angry with Cassie. I loved her, dammit. A person has to make allowances. She was the best thing that ever happened to me. Lowering my voice so the kids wouldn’t hear, I narrowed my eyes, and resorted to blatant extortion. “If I catch you again, I’ll break your fingers! Enough said?”

Some day the motel would sell and my mother would pay me back. This thought sustained me through what was a most impecunious time. Cassie hadn’t even bothered to chase her boyfriend for child support, and if we had to make do, wearing each other’s clothes, eating hamburg instead of steak, drinking water instead of alcohol, it was a small price to pay. Cassie made being single fun.

Every night, no matter how tired we were, Cassie would look at me, and I would look at her, and we’d decide to go dancing. Someone at the motel always offered to look after the kids. About an hour or two before last call, after everyone else was blitzed, Cassie and I would arrive like debutantes, fresh from the shower and dressed in our cumulative best. Strobe lights blinked on the Quarterdeck’s dance floor and lions and tigers roared fluorescently from the walls igniting a passion for lust we were too burned-out to acknowledge. When the moon was full, we couldn’t stand to be in, so we would go to Skip’s tiki bar on the beach, famous for its rock music and macho men wearing black-banded Panama hats.

More than once, I had to tear Cassie away from someone I thought wasn’t good enough. She had hips, which flared from a wasp-like waist, a ready smile and the carriage of a woman who thought well of herself. I always felt apologetic dickering about room prices, but Cassie could look a stranger in the eye and get twice as much as the law allowed even though the rates were posted behind every bathroom door. Mom was so proud of Cassie she began calling her an adopted daughter.
Things were going great until the day mom brought us to her health club. In the locker room, I found a wallet. Larceny bloomed in my heart like one of those desert flowers that only lasts a day, leaving my mother in the steam room. Cassie had the Visa. The Master Charge, clutched in my hot little hypocritical hand, was mine.

How pleased mother would be…. How strange that instead of picking things that she needed or wanted, the need to get approval from that forbidding matriarch prevailed. “Get sheets, towels… lamps,” I remember her saying, voice of reason amidst temporary insanity. My first instinct had been to get to the airport and fly to Hawaii. Cassie, in her glory, was flush with a lust no sheets had ever seen. Her cheeks took on a sunset glow, her eyes, the look of a soldier going into battle. I was brave for all of two seconds after she left for her charging spree, limiting myself to a pair of real gold earrings, in a jewelry store, hemming and hawing at the cash register, breasts heaving through my tank top, distracting the salesman. Three very obvious peeks at the Master Charge card before I could sign. The guy had to have been retarded. What the hell was this lady’s name? I couldn’t think straight when I was nervous.

Cassie soon maxed out the Visa. Though she sensed the salespeople were looking at her funny, as indeed they were (the lady at the health club was no dummy and they had computers) she couldn’t resist one last fling, grabbing my brown suede wallet with the Master Card and headed off to a different part of the mall for what seemed like the longest hour of my life. I waited in the car, so loaded with emblazoned Burdines shopping bags that a television had to be squeezed in on the passenger seat. As the sun disappeared, the cars in the parking lot began to disperse. Closing time. I went in for one last look for Cassie, frantically running up and down the mall, surprising last minute shoppers in dressing rooms and peeking under bathroom stalls. I must have gone back to the car five times. Finally, despairingly, I moved to the parking lot of a Dairy Freeze, lurking under the palm trees, hoping against hope, that the good Lord would forgive us for what would amount in that arcane legalese world to grand larceny.

Escorted by security guards, Cassie was waving her arms in the gloom, telling some crazy story about a man who had put a gun to her head and threatened her son’s life is she didn’t do what he said. They took her away in cuffs! A property owner had to sign for bail. “Mom,” I said, in a phone call for which she will never forgive me. “Don’t ask any questions and bring your check book.” Why go into a long story? My mother, with her lips set tightly, a true champ under the circumstances, went with me to the bail bondsman, explaining that I hadn’t been quite right since my husband left me for another woman, how the devil had possessed my soul. We had never gotten along well, but this was the first time I’d done anything to shame her. Even with all this evil gestating in me, I’d been the perfect daughter… obedient, kind, generous, no cutting school or dropping my drawers for the neighborhood boys. There was one time when I snuck out the window to meet my boyfriend, but doesn’t every teenager try that?

“Whatever you do, honey, don’t go down there,” said the dour-faced bondsman, chomping on a soggy, cigar stub. Jowly, he looked like a bulldog. I was so ashamed, my eyes fixated on his calendar on this silicon bombshell straddling a Harley. My alter ego! Oh God, was I having a nightmare or was this really happening? My mother signed the papers in perfect penmanship with a steady hand.

Zombie-like, what they call dissociation, I’ll bet, I followed my mother into the police station. Cassie was passing us in the hall. She handed me my wallet and her peat-black eyes flashed a message my mind was too numb to decipher until later. In the change purse was a brown vial with enough hash oil to send me away for 20 years, taken from a guy as collateral for a loan. People would get high from one drop of this stuff on the tip of a cigarette. It tasted like burnt rubber, just terrible! Behind the bulletproof glass of the booking desk, Cassie was signing papers. A policeman with a gold badge ushered me into a room with bright lights. I didn’t cry, but I groveled plenty.

“I know where the stuff is and I’ll bring it all back,” I said, folding my arms across my chest to keep my body from quaking, willing my eyes to keep dry. Ingénue eyes of an innocent mother, caught up in the whole Florida experience. It seemed like everybody and their old aunt Matilda was selling dope. How was it that I had to be caught my very first illegality? My life was a curse! If a look from my mother could wilt my soul, imagine how traumatized I was now.

“And if you weren’t with her, how would you know? She didn’t even make a phone call.”

“We’re close. Like sisters. But that’s all I’ll tell you without an attorney.” My fingers toyed with the gold earrings and came away as if they were burnt. I had no idea why they didn’t arrest me. God was good.

“You’re pretty smart,” said the detective, tuning in to something I wasn’t aware of. “Are you a lawyer, or something?”

If I were so smart what was I doing there? The biggest mistake of my life, a thief, of all things, with my one badge of honor, motherhood, hanging in the balance. A voice came out of my lips, wooden, like it belonged to a Charlie McCarthy doll. I hoped I didn’t sound impudent. “No, but I watch a lot of F.B.I.” On Sundays, when I’d been married, when that show was on, my husband would give me the option of making love during the commercials or not at all. This humiliation flooded my thoughts so that I blurted: “The Miranda decision was first written on a roll of toilet paper.”

“Your friend,” said the policeman, non-plussed by this non-sequitor, “is free on bail pending a pre-sentence investigation. If you want to help her, the department stores might be willing to settle for restitution. The rest, of course, will be up to the state.” The grilling was over. I drove my car into the bowels of the police station to be unloaded, too wanting of something nice to remove the earrings.

That night, as Cassie and I talked, my hair turned white, imagining me and the kids on the lam in South America. Cassie’s foot had been injured in the scuffle when one of the security guards tackled her as she’d tried to escape. Her ankle, blown up to twice its size, was sitting gingerly on a pillow by the pool. “Never again,” said Cassie. “There was a pregnant woman in my cell for stealing a piece of cheese. Can you imagine? No one to go her bail and she’d been there for six months. I’m so grateful to you for getting me out.”

“It was the least I could do,” I said. Facing my mother was the hardest thing I had ever done up until then. I leaned back on the chaise lounge and looked up at the sky. The stars and the moon seemed so close, the air smelling of coconut and gardenia. How lucky I was to have met Cassie. There was no way I would ever settle for anything less in a relationship. Without knowing it, Cassie had given me more than I ever gave her. But nothing could stop my negative thinking that night. We were both going to jail. Tommy would go to the state, and my husband would get custody. Other than Cassie, there was no one I trusted to raise my son. I wasn’t the type to make friends easily. Mom just wouldn’t do, with that short temper, the way she made me feel like she’d wished I’d never been born. She kept the house well, and was a whiz at business, but nurturing wasn’t her long suite. Every Christmas for as long as I could remember, my mom would get over 200 Christmas cards, hang them from the eaves on display. I was lucky if I got about 8.

The enormity of the crime I’d committed was just beginning to sink in. “Tell me about the hash oil, Cassie.”

“The matron grabbed the vial out of the change purse and held it up to the light. I grabbed it out of her hand. ‘Give me my expensive perfume,’ I said.”

Cassie was a quick-thinking girl. I would have fainted dead away. I was under so much stress that I was always on the verge of collapse, anyway, some kind of narcolepsy. The doctor was giving me adrenal cortisone shots. Cassie pumped me full of fresh vegetables and iron, but the fear of losing custody was driving me crazy. It’s a well-known ploy, if the truth be known, with men who haven’t the slightest interest in raising kids. Nobody had ever called me a paranoid schizophrenic though sometimes I wondered why not.

“We might as well forget about going to the Quarterdeck,” Cassie said. “We’d better enroll the boys in Sunday School.” It sounded like a plan. A little Bible-thumping never hurt.

Cassie couldn’t do more than hobble for a few weeks, and by then, she’d been assigned a probation officer who told her that no charges were going to be filed against me. I sold my Bugatti to pay for the lawyer. Cassie married a construction worker that I’d met and introduced her to because she thought it would look good to the judge, but the case never went to court. I redeemed my green stamps to buy a Mickey Mouse clock for her new apartment, one that Tommy, who was beginning to tell time, would enjoy.

After a decent interval, my little boy and I paid a visit. I was anxious to hear how she liked married life. I missed her terribly and so did my son. His eyes were gleaming with anticipation, a new Tonka truck in his hands. It would take 2 to enjoy it to its fullest, digging and filling and emptying the sand on the beach. His tossled blond head, bleached by the pool’s chlorine, came even with the door knob. I would have done anything to shield him from pain, I loved him so much. “I can’t let you in,” said Cassie, opening the door a crack just wide enough to slip the clock through. “My husband thinks you’re a bad influence.”