Mother Gets a Lift by Lesley A. Diehl Page A

insurance throws me out of this room. They need an ID, but I’m not sure I can do it.”
    “I’ll go.”
    “No, Fred. You met her only once, at our wedding, and that was over ten years ago. You can’t be expected to recognize her.”
    That was my problem too. I saw my mother only now and then, probably once every two or three years. We were not close. She sometimes forgot she had a daughter, and when she did remember, she couldn’t recall my name. And, no, she did not have Alzheimer’s. She just wasn’t into mothering and never had been. She was, however, into rich men. She’d married five or six of them. I lose count. She outlived most of them and divorced the others. Mom did not have great staying power in relationships.
    What she did have was an obsession with plastic surgery. She called it her “little hobby,” discovered when her first wealthy husband died. My dad was her real first husband, but he was not wealthy. He was just tolerant, and he paid for it by dying of a heart attack brought on by the stress of living with my mother for over fifteen years. Of course the doctors didn’t say that, but everyone thought it.
    Because of the plastic surgery I never knew whom I was going to see when we got together. She was barely recognizable as the woman I remembered from my adolescent years. Her body and face didn’t move much anymore, so it was difficult to say if she was glad to be with me or not. Aside from channeling her personality when I delivered my three children, she and I did not have much in common.
    *
    I put off identifying the body for three days, because Fred needed some bed rest. The deliveries were always hard on him. Aside from retaining some of the weight I gained with the pregnancy, I had accomplished my usual express lane delivery and recovery. No postpartum blues for this gal. The days following the birth were like discovering you misread your scale and you were really twenty pounds lighter not heavier. No running, of course, but skipping wasn’t totally out of the question.
    I didn’t consider meeting one’s grandmother in a morgue the best experience for my newborn daughter, so I decided to view the body alone. Fred’s schedule of teaching at the community college would allow me half the day to pop up to Miami while he sat with the kids. I let Stella determine her schedule and found I could nurse her every two to three hours, enough time for me to drive from our home in Key Largo to the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s Office. If there was no accident on the twenty-mile stretch, the only road connecting the Keys to mainland Florida, it would take me an hour each way. I made it in under an hour.
    A detective met me in the waiting area of the morgue.
    “I’m Detective Estevez.” He shook my hand. “I’m sorry to inconvenience you this way with your new baby and all.”
    “You have no idea just how inconvenient.” I thought of Fred, poor nervous Fred, trying to take care of two boys, ages four and six, and a newborn. Oh yeah, and the dog.
    Estevez scowled. I guess he didn’t think new mothers should be so honest, but, in my book, that’s another word for “acerbic.”
    “I don’t understand why you couldn’t have asked Clay, her husband, to do it.”
    “I guess you and your mother weren’t close, right?”
    “Don’t get me started. I hardly knew her. So where’s Clay?”
    “He’s been arrested.”
    “For?”
    “For her murder. Someone saw him push her off the ship.”
    That sounded reasonable. It probably was only a matter of time before one of her husbands tried to do in the woman.
    “She was on a ship?”
    “The Cosmetic Cruise. It was advertised as ‘seven days at sea—under the knife in paradise.’ The ship cruised to the Bahamas and nearby islands, and the women had their faces and other body parts sculpted by some plastic surgeon out of California.”
    That was Mom. And that was the problem. If she’d had even more surgery onboard, there was no chance I’d