At the word “strip,’” I felt my face get hot. My eyes darted away from Maddie. Memories of what Carlos and I had done all afternoon in an empty cabin at the fish camp filled my head. Skilled at reading the body language of guilty middle-schoolers, Maddie gave me an assessing look.

“Well, at least you have some color in your cheeks. We’ll tell Mama you’re trying out a new blush for the wedding.”

“I …”

She raised a crossing-guard’s hand. “Stop right there. I don’t want to hear it. I just hope you’re using protection.”

If my face was red before, it was burning now. “Maddie, please! I’m not one of your students.”

“No, you’re just acting like one. Do I know the lucky man?”

I pressed my lips together.

“Was it Tony?”

I shook my head.

“Is it that rodeo devil, Jeb Ennis, back in the saddle again?”

Another head shake.

“Oh, no you didn’t! Are you playing around with poor Carlos again?”

I folded my arms across my chest. “He wasn’t exactly complaining.”

“Give him time. I have no doubt you’ll be back to making him miserable once the afterglow’s gone.” She tsked. “Now, get out of those nasty boots and slap a smile on your face. We’ve just started a game of Pin the Tail on the Groom.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Sal’s here?”

“Yes, everything’s patched up; Mama’s over the Mystery Woman. But now, Sal’s the life of the party, and he’s stealing her spotlight. She might just give him the hook.”

As I stood on the mat to remove my boots, Maddie muttered as she moved down the hallway: “ ‘All the modern showers have the bride and groom together, Maddie.’ That’s when I should have said, ‘Since when is Himmarshee modern, Mama?’ ”

I heard a loud whoop of female laughter from the next room. And then Sal’s Bronx honk boomed, “Careful there, Dab! Another inch closer and I couldn’t perform my husbandly duties on the honeymoon.”

Ohmigod! It was the hussy from the drive-thru!

I came into the living room, barefoot, just in time to see a blindfolded senior citizen in a silver lamé mini-dress, holding a fabric donkey tail in her hand. The sticky swatch at the end was aimed perilously near Sal’s private parts. As Dab gave a sultry laugh, Mama did a slow burn on the couch.

As I sat, she hissed, “I never should have invited that shameless woman. She’s flirting with Sal, right in front of me, and I’m the bride!”

“Shhh,” Marty whispered from the floor. “Dab looks like she’s been rode hard and put up wet. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“And she’s ancient,” Maddie said. “I doubt she’s flirting.”

“Well, I’m sixty years old …” Mama started.

“You’re almost sixty-three,” Maddie corrected.

“Thank you, Maddie. I didn’t know you were running the Florida Department of Vital Statistics in addition to the middle school.” She smoothed her hair and lowered her voice. “As I was saying, Dab’s only got about ten years on me. A woman, and especially that one, doesn’t forget how to flirt just because she gets older.”

Mama seemed to notice me on the couch for the first time. “If it’s a woman who ever knew how to flirt, that is.”

I let the shot roll off my back. I was just grateful she was focused on Dab instead of on my late arrival. Or my bare feet. Or the color in my cheeks from incredible sex.

“Didn’t you say she had a doozy of a story, Mama?” I asked.

“Only if you think dancing naked on stage in a cage in Las Vegas is a story.” Mama raised a hand, ticking off items on her fingers. “Or, it’s a story being married more times than me, even though she claims we’re equal because she actually married the same man twice. Or, doing time in prison …”

“Uhmmm, Mama?” Marty said. “You’ve done time, too.”

She waved her hand. “That was just jail, honey. And it was all a mistake. Dab Holt got sent up for murder, I heard. They say she shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”

Marty snorted a swallow of pink wine out her nose. Maddie said, “For heaven’s sake, Mama! You’re quoting a lyric from a Johnny Cash song.”

“Well, I can’t help that, Maddie. Maybe he wrote the song about Dab.”

“How come we’ve never met her? She sounds fascinating,” I said.

Dab was snake-dancing around Sal, using the donkey tail like a stripper’s scarf.

“My goodness, Mace! I tried to give you girls a good example growing up. I wouldn’t have exposed you to a woman as bad as Dab.”

Maddie said, “Dab beat out Mama for Miss Swamp Cabbage in 1965. They never spoke again, until Mama decided to make amends by inviting her to the shower.”

“The vote was rigged.” Mama fluffed her hair. “I suspect she did a special favor for one of the judges. Plus, she was too old, according to the rules. She lied about her age!”

“Imagine that,” Maddie said.

“How’d she come by that unusual name?” Marty asked.

“Her daddy called her that because she was so tiny; just a little dab,” Mama said.

I looked at Mama’s frenemy, doing a shimmy now, the shiny fabric of her dress stretched tight across her breasts. They perched unnaturally high and round on her skinny frame, like two honeydew melons on a grocer’s shelf.

“I guess she got her nickname before she got the implants,” I said.

Betty came over just then with a cup of punch and a plate: A deviled egg, a pig-in-the-blanket, some spicy bean dip with a few tortilla chips, and three ham-and-cheese roll-ups.

“Bless you, Betty. I’m starving.”

“Well I could tell you didn’t stop home to eat, Mace, ’cause I know you would have done something with that hair.”

My hand went to my mass of snarls. I couldn’t remember if I even washed it after my dip in the lake. There hadn’t been much time for hair care once Carlos joined me in the shower.

“Is that a new shade of blush, Mace?” Betty asked. “It’s very becoming. But, honey, you have got to come in to Hair Today, Dyed Tomorrow and let us fix that mess on your head. You can’t walk down the aisle in that beautiful dress with hair that looks styled by a weed whacker.”

“Amen!” Mama said, though her eyes were still fastened on Sal and Dab.

Now, Dab was affixing the tail to Sal’s upper arm. She gave his bicep an appreciative squeeze. Mama sat on the edge of the couch, as if she was about to launch herself like a missile at Dab.

“My Lord!” Dab’s voice sounded like sex and cigarettes. “You must really work out. And I do hope that’s your arm.”

Marty giggled. I leaned behind Mama and raised my eyebrows at Maddie. She grinned.

“Looks like you are never too old,” she said.

Mama rocketed off the couch, shouting, “Next!”

She grabbed the blindfold off Dab. I thought she’d yank out a handful of her scarlet bouffant, too. But she just gave Dab a tight smile.

“Maybe you’d better sit down and rest a bit, honey.” She patted Dab’s arm. “Those varicose veins must act up something awful at your age.”

“I guess at your age your eyesight’s not what it used to be, Rosalee.” Hiking a high-heeled foot onto Betty’s coffee table, Dab displayed a surprisingly shapely leg. “I don’t have any varicose veins.”

Pushing past Dab to claim her rightful place on stage, Mama tied the blindfold gingerly, so as not to muss her helmet of hair. Since I was woefully familiar with the Mama Show, I turned my attention to my food and punch while I checked out Betty’s home.

And I’d thought Hair Today was a purple palace. Her home made the salon seem sedate. The living room drapes were mulberry velvet, with low-hanging swags in the same shade. The over-stuffed couch was plush, and as purple as an eggplant. The carpet was a thick pile, closer to lilac than lavender. About the only thing that wasn’t purple was the TV, and it wore an orchid-hued doily like a lacy hat.

In her sherbet-colored pantsuit, Mama looked like a tangerine in a bowl of plums.

Among a dozen or so guests, I recognized some of Mama’s bingo buddies and several of her fellow church-goers. D’Vora, from the salon, chatted with Charlene, the waitress from Gladys’ Diner. Alice Hodges sat by herself, an untouched plate of food on her lap. Her clothes were clean and pressed, and she wore a hint of lipstick. She’d tried to fix herself up. But her eyes were still blank; her complexion sallow. It seemed as if no one wanted to breach the force field of mourning that surrounded her.