Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict by Thomas T. Thomas

popular in the nineteen-sixties, during his own childhood. When Wells had looked up that woman online, she saw the resemblance immediately. She also noticed that the actress had perfect, flawless skin. One day John would wake up to her real face—an aging, sagging face, just as she was seeing it now. And what would he do then?
    She knew many women her age—and even a decade or two younger—who had turned to medical solutions to retain their beauty. They smoothed the wrinkles with botulinum toxin and collagen injections. They tightened sagging eyelids, cheeks, jaws, and throats with cosmetic surgery. They let the doctors trim, stretch, and pull at what was left of cheekbones and noses. But Wells could always spot these women and describe for herself exactly which procedures they had bought. To Wells, they didn’t look young and girlish but instead seemed pinched and severe, with faces pulled ever so slightly out of alignment, with narrowed eyes and tight, angry mouths. Witchlike, if not indeed simply frozen and lifeless. She wanted none of that.
    But now she was also going to be a mother, for the first time, and at almost seventy years of age. True, the boy would come from her body only through reference to her DNA, and not even from one of her own eggs. But he would know Antigone Wells as his mother, gaze up into her face, and call her “Mama,” while everyone looked on and tried to smile.
    “And I will look more like his grandmother,” she whispered to the mirror. “Not good, Antigone. Not good at all.”
    * * *
    On one of his rare visits to the Sansome Street headquarters, Brandon Praxis stopped by the cubicle where Penny Winston ran the technical end of the business from three console screens, a keyboard, and a microphone headset that clamped down on her curly brown hair. When she turned away from work to answer his knock he saw that, wonder of wonders, she was not wearing her usual jeans and vaguely subversive tee shirt. This morning—and maybe for a while now—she wore a navy-blue, polka-dot dress with a high neckline, a little white belt, and flouncy skirt. She also wore nylon stockings and matching, dark-blue pumps. She looked like an Iowa teenager heading off to church.
    Her eyes brightened and she smiled when she saw him.
    “Do you want to go get lunch?” he asked.
    “Gosh, is it noon already?”
    “Just about.”
    “Sure!”
    She took off the headset, ruffled her hair with her fingertips, and stood up from her desk chair. The dress swirled around her knees. She picked up a light jacket—one without camouflage—and joined him in the hallway. He noticed she didn’t bother to close down any applications or switch off any devices. Then he remembered that she did not actually run the computer system so much as collaborate with it.
    “Where do we eat?” she asked.
    “By now, you know this neighborhood better than I do.”
    “Okay. Um … do you like vegetarian Chinese?”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “Are you a vegan?”
    “Not normally.” She grinned. “But it’s the only kind where they don’t chop up the meat with the bones still inside.”
    Brandon grinned in return. That summed up his feelings about truly ethnic Chinese cooking—the only kind you could get this close to Chinatown. “You lead,” he said.
    As they had settled into the booth at the Jade Garden, Brandon suggested Penny order for both of them. Instead, she discussed choices from the menu and gave him veto power, which he found the most satisfactory solution. When the waiter brought a pot of black tea, she picked up a plastic chopstick, opened the lid, and stirred at the leaves inside.
    “You know …” she said, then pinched her lips together.
    “What?” he asked. She seemed suddenly shy.
    “Never mind. It’s not your concern.”
    “No, you started to say …?”
    “Well, I guess you should know, as head of security.”
    “Are you having trouble? Is someone harassing you?”
    “Nothing like that. Just … I