“No,” the voice said, warily. “This is Thomas.”

“Is Albert there?”

“Hold on.” There was a muffled noise, someone’s hand covering the receiver. Then, “Hello, Albert speaking.”

“Albert, this is Remy Starr.”

“Hey, Remy! Look, this thing with the cars is just messed up, okay?”

“My mother is approaching meltdown, Albert.”

“I know, I know. But look, this is what Thomas was trying to tell her. What we’ll do is…”

Five minutes later, I went up the stairs and knocked on my mother’s door. When I came in, she was sitting in front of her vanity. She looked no different except that she had changed her dress and now sat dabbing at her face with a makeup brush. Ah, progress.

“All fixed,” I told her. “A car will be here at six. It’s a Town Car, not a limo, but we’re set for tomorrow and that’s what really matters. Okay?”

She sighed, placing one hand over her chest, as if this, finally, calmed her racing heart. “Wonderful. Thank you.”

I sat down on her bed, kicking off my shoes, and glanced at the clock. It was five-fifteen. I could be ready in eighteen minutes flat, including drying my hair, so I lay back and closed my eyes. I could hear my mother making her getting-ready noises: perfume bottles clinking, brushes dabbing, small containers of face cream and eye gel being moved around on the mirrored tabletop in front of her. My mother was glamorous long before she had reason to be. She’d always been small and wiry, full of energy and prone to dramatic outbursts: she liked to wear lots of bangle bracelets that clanked as she waved her arms around, sweeping the air as she talked. Even when she taught at the community college and most of her students were half asleep after working full days, she dressed for class, with full makeup and perfume and her trademark swishy outfits in bright colors. She kept her hair dyed jet black now that it was graying, and wore it in a short, blunt cut with thick bangs cut straight across. With her long, flowing skirts and the hair she almost could have been a geisha, except that she was way too noisy.

“Remy, honey,” she said suddenly, and I jerked up, realizing I’d almost fallen asleep. “Can you come do my clasp?”

I stood up and walked over to where she was sitting, taking the necklace she handed to me. “You look beautiful,” I told her. It was true. Tonight, she was wearing a long red dress with a drop neckline, amethyst earrings, and the big diamond ring Don had given her. She smelled like L’Air du Temps, which, when I was little, I thought was the most wonderful scent in the world. The whole house reeked of it: it clung to the drapes and rugs the way cigarette smoke does, stubbornly and forever.

“Thank you, sweetheart,” she said as I did the clasp. Looking at us reflected in the mirror I was struck again by how little we resembled each other: me blond and thin, her darker and more voluptuous. I didn’t look like my father, either. I didn’t have many early pictures of him, but in the ones I had seen he always looked grizzled, in that 1960s rock kind of way, with a beard and long hair. He also looked permanently stoned, which my mother never disputed when I pointed it out. Oh, but he had such a beautiful voice, she’d say, now that he was gone. One song, and I was a goner.

Now, she turned around and took my hands in hers. “Oh, Remy,” she said, smiling, “can you believe this? We’re going to be so happy. ”

I nodded.

“I mean,” she said, turning around, “it’s not like this is my first time going down the aisle.”

“Nope,” I agreed, smoothing her hair down where it was poking up slightly in the back.

“But it just feels real this time. Permanent. Don’t you think?”

I knew what she wanted me to say, but still I hesitated. It seemed like a bad movie, this ritual we’d gone through twice already that I could remember. At this point, the other bridesmaids and myself considered the ceremonies more like class reunions, where we stood off to the side and discussed who had gotten fat or gone bald since my mother’s last wedding. I had no illusions about love anymore. It came, it went, it left casualties or it didn’t. People weren’t meant to be together forever, regardless of what the songs say. I would have been doing her a favor dragging forth the other wedding albums she kept stacked under her bed and pointing at the pictures, forcing her to take in the same things, the same people, the same cake/champagne toast/first dance poses we’d be seeing again in the next forty-eight hours. Maybe she could forget, push those husbands and memories out of sight and out of mind. But I couldn’t.

She was still smiling at me in the mirror. Sometimes I thought if she could read my mind it would kill her. Or both of us.

“Different,” she said, convincing herself. “It’s different this time.”

“Sure, Mom,” I said, putting my hands on her shoulders. They felt small to me, somehow, from where I stood. “Sure it is.”

On my way down to my room, Chris jumped out at me.

“Remy! You’ve got to see this.”

I glanced at my watch-five-thirty-and then followed him into the lizard room. It was cramped, and he had to keep it hot all the time, which made being in there feel like a really long elevator ride to nowhere.

“Look,” he said, grabbing my hand and yanking me down beside him, next to the incubator. The top was off and inside there was a small Tupperware container, filled with what looked like moss. On top of it were three little eggs. One was broken open, one kind of mushed, and the other had a little hole in the top.