Page 17 of Bossy Mess

“He was dating that girl,” my mom told me. “You know the one I’m talking about? The one with the teeth?”

She flipped through the magazine.

“Most girls his age have teeth, Mom.”

This was what she tended to do: give me a vague description of someone or something and expect me to provide the answer, turning our conversations into a form of the game Taboo. Or at least that’s how I started to treat it, in order to avoid getting frustrated by her.

“You know what I mean,” she said, glaring at me. “Most girls at my age have teeth, too, believe it or not. And those who don’t wear dentures so good you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”

She flipped to a page with that boy from the cover walking across the beach with a brunette woman half his size. She pointed at the woman. “This one. I can never remember her name.”

She held the magazine away from her and then closer, trying to find the distance where she could read it from, but without her reading glasses, she was hopeless.

“I don’t follow these things, Mom,” I told her. “They’re all strangers to me. My pop culture knowledge stops at 1989.”

For a moment, it looked like she was about to say something. Instead, she sniffed the air. A devilish grin filled her face and she put the magazine down in her lap, closing the cover.

“You have some real-life gossip to share, don’t you?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t try to deny it, boy. That’s perfume on you.”

I shook my head.

“I was helping one of my agents with a couple of tough clients,” I said. “Merely professional.”

“So, you put perfume on?”

“No, mother. I drove her to the site, and we sat in the car together.”

“She smells pretty. Is she pretty?” She sniffed some more. “Young, too, right?”

“Mom,” I said, “in today’s work environment, we don’t comment on the appearance of people in the office.”

She made yapping puppet gestures with her hands.

“Spill the beans,” she said, “did you bed her?”

“Mom!” I said. “I could get in trouble for even suggesting such a thing.”

“Then don’t suggest,” she said, “tell me. You did, didn’t you? Or at least you’re going to, right?”

I shook my head. “Things don’t work that way.”

The look on her face was halfway between confusion and disgust.

“You work so hard to get in your position in your career,” she says, “and you don’t even get to play around with the young ladies? When I was young, that was the only reason men would do anything. They’d be mixing drinks in the office and wooing the pretty girls — it was like a party in there.”

She shook her head.

“I can’t imagine how dull work must be without the sex and the booze. What do you even do with your time?”

“We sell houses.”

My mom blew a raspberry at me. “That’s boring.” She began rolling her chair away from me over to the game table in the corner of the room. “Well, if you’re not going to share any juicy office gossip with me, can I interest you in a game of backgammon?”

I followed right behind her to a board that was already set up for us.

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