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What parent wants to ask questions about drugs? It's more like duty than conversation; there's no good way to open the topic and it's not only uncomfortable to discuss (for both kids and parents), it sure doesn't feel like love or concern.

In my own case, when I went off to college at age 17, one of my mother's biggest worries was that once I was living in a larger arena; that is, without supervision, I'd succumb to peer pressure and (bereft of a warm and loving atmosphere at home) start to use drugs.

The first crisp autumn weekend I came home from Connecticut to New York I was not aware that my mother was anxious. Certainly, during my high school years, there was no doubt in her mind that I was not using any type of illicit substance; and, I wasn't. So the Sunday night after my departure, I was pretty surprised to get a call from her that focused on drug use.

"Hi. After you left I was using the Swiffer and I found an orange pill under your bed."

"An orange pill?" I was in Catholic school almost my entire life and I was so prone to guilt, not only did I feel wretched when I talked about drugs with my mother, I felt guilty because I knew of people who used drugs. I felt guilty that drugs and the seamy side of life they represented even existed.

"An orange pill, you say?" I was stalling; I was already racking my brain feverishly trying to think about what I could say about such clear-cut evidence and where it might have come from. No one else had been to visit me over the weekend. My brother was married and living in Seattle.

"Yeah, an orange pill. I looked it up and it wasn't in my PDR." My mother was a Public Health Director; and the book she meant was the Physician's Desk Reference, which has thousands of glossy photos of manufactured pills sprawled across its opening pages.

There wasn't even a coward's last resort of blaming it on a friend. Or aliens. Or interspatial teleport. Certainly the cat had not brought this unknown substance into the house and stashed it on the worn maple floorboards behind my white dust ruffle. My mother didn't like dogs, so we didn't have a dog; so even if I could have blamed a dog, there were none handy.

"It had an E on it.but I couldn't find it anywhere and that made me worry even more," my mother said. "So I cut it open."

The goddamn pill might have been orange, but I was already turning ashen.

"You know what was in it?"

Oh God, I thought. She's in public health and she deals with this stuff all day long and she found Ecstasy. Or speed.

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