Don’t Let Your Mother Answer for You

I met him last night.”

And my mother said: “Well.

That doesn’t prove anything.”

I asked her whether she had opened it.

She said she had.

She said this without any apparent awareness that it was an admission, in the tone of a woman explaining that she had signed for a parcel.

I asked her whether she had told the mail carrier I did not live there.

She said, “I may have said you were overseas.”