by Elizabeth Reeves

Created on: August 11, 2008

My mother was pale, frail, and determined to have fun. We both pretended that her fingers didn't shake as she stroked them across the smooth front of a geode, sitting up on the counter. The hidden crystals inside, brought sparkling to light under the saw, were a milky blue, a color that I knew my mother loved. I sighed as she set the geode down, to paw through the other items on the counter.

The air was heavy, even inside, and full of unfamiliar moisture. It, and the effort of pretending, brought salty beads of sweat out on my skin, making me uncomfortably clammy. I pressed my palms against the back of my t-shirt to blot the moisture away, hoping my mother wouldn't notice.

Outside, it was gray, characteristically February, even in Tucson. The drizzle had been piddling out for the last three days, and even my bones felt a little moldy and restless. The barn would be flooded, a soup of sloppy mud and manure. I'd had to slosh through it last night, for chores, and, though I had thought I had scrubbed down my shoes to make myself presentable in public, I was self consciously aware of the sweet tangy scent of horse emanating from my feet. Ah well, I sighed to myself, it was in keeping with the eternal supply of horse and cat hair that seemed the most common decoration on my shirt-front.

Mom reached up, with an unconscious gesture, to tug down on the scarf she wore over her head. It hadn't shifted at all, but it was a gesture that had come to replace the way she had once pushed her glasses up on her nose. I missed that little habit, though it had once irritated me. Funny how some things change. I glanced at her face. A little line furrowed her brow as she pursed her lips, sorting through the geological treasures in front of us.

Going to the gem show every year was a tradition with us. We never missed a chance to go. To us it was like shopping was for mall rats. It made us feel like we had some kind of secret life, shucking off our day-to-day garb to play at amateur geology and archeology. For my mother, especially, it was passion. We had boxes of useless, bright, beautiful pieces of stone and fossil, scattered all through the house from all our ventures through the Aladdin's cave of treasures that marched through Tucson annually. It was our one, big, temptation, and we never even tried to resist the glowing cat's eyes, trilobites embedded with stone they were all treasures to us.

This year, though, I felt out of place, awkward, wrong. I would have rather been anywhere

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