I would know her from seeing her a mile away. There she was, sitting at her usual spot in the cafe as if nothing had ever happened. It was as if she hadn’t died from lung cancer, spending her last hours, days, weeks, and months in agony and regret. Why nobody noticed her, I couldn’t tell you. They walked by us as if we weren’t there at all. There she was, prettier than ever, but then the afterlife must not take the same toll on the soul as this world did on the body.

“Happy Mother’s Day, Mom,” I told my mother at last, wondering if people would notice me and soon cart me off to the psych ward.

“Hello, Daniel. And thank you for that. It’s the first time I’ve heard it ... since death,” Mom told me, never liking my preference for “Dan.”

Well, it was Mother’s Day and she was dead, so I would humor her. Of course, she would likely still prefer me to say it in her native French, especially Maman instead of Mom, but ... well, I was an American, like it or not. She was never naturalized, something that always puzzled. She lived in the United States, gave birth to three Americans, married an American, divorced the same American, and yet she always remained proudly and staunchly French to her core.

Séraphine Ariane Duclos, that was her name by birth. She wed my father, Anton Marko Petrovic, years back. He was the son of a Macedonian immigrant who fled Tito’s rise to power. There was some lingering speculation that Grandpa was probably a Chetnik, a Yugoslav monarchist resistance fighter, or at least that he had monarchist sympathies, though it was never proven. Thus I was born of rather pronounced mixed Franco-Macedonian stock, which left me looking very foreign or ethnic to most Americans and caused most Europeans to doubt that I was American, too. I never needed a DNA kit to know my own ancestry, of course.

It was funny that both of my parents were atheists, both were smokers, and both were heavy drinkers of both coffee and brandy. I suppose those were things that helped them bond. They were also both rather adulterous, but that was never an issue for me. Not being born into a highly religious or moralistic family, there was far less baggage in that way. Well, there was until Dad got religion, that was. Yes, you could say that Jesus was a homewrecker, because he broke up my parents’ marriage.

When I was just fourteen, Dad gave up smoking, drinking, adultery, even coffee when he was converted by Mormon missionaries who came to our house. He told Mom in no uncertain terms that he wanted her to change as well, to convert, to give up her lovers, to drop the smoking, the drinking, the coffee, all of it. Their divorce struck like lightning not long afterward, because Mom wasn’t about to change her ways. It hurt me, seeing them split like that, but I knew that Mom didn’t change the rules of the marriage. Dad did when he tried to impose strict monogamy and the Word of Wisdom on her overnight by ultimatum.

Dad remarried, but Mom did not. She absolutely, flatly refused to ever take that kind of chance again. She used to joke that I was her man now, not Dad. She didn’t need a new spouse, she told me. She was happy with her lovers ... and with me. Well, her lovers eventually passed from the scene, though I didn’t judge them for that. Men and women alike, they were predominantly married or otherwise attached, a number of them were cheaters, and several were parents. While they cared for her, they had obligations and responsibilities that conflicted with caring for a sickly, ailing woman on the cusp of menopause who learned of her lung cancer far too late to survive it.

I had two sisters, but neither lady seemed that eager to drop everything to be Mom’s caregiver. That role fell to me, causing me to leave the Army as soon as my enlistment was up and get a job closer to home. Uncle Sam was a great employer, but I loved Mom far too much to let her die in some hospice with strangers. I had nothing against hospices. I just refused to let them do my job for me. We had plenty of tensions and conflict, Mom and I, but I felt as if the last days of her life she was happier with me than she would have been without me.

“Penny for your thoughts, or should I say Euro, since this is Paris?” Mom asked me now.

“Oh, I was just ... thinking of old times. I’m just glad that I spent your last days with you, not with Dad and Karen. I never much liked Karen. She convinced Dad that I should be circumcised. Did you know that? She got him to be circumcised, too. That must have been very painful for a grown man. The Church didn’t even require it ... and I was never ... you know ... baptized. I think that Karen wanted to punish me for my fierce refusal to convert like Dad did. I also think that she wanted to discourage masturbation, but it backfired, of course,” I chuckled now.

“Yes, I was outraged when I learned of that, I assure you. They never consulted me about it, you know. In France, we never did that kind of thing unless you were Jewish, Muslim, or had some medical necessity for it. I was under the impression, quite honestly, that the LDS Church required it. Now that you told me otherwise, I am livid, as much as that is possible for a ghost,” Mom reassured me.

“Dad really went downhill without you, Mom. Karen was nothing but an interloper, a pernicious influence, strict as fuck with me, with Julie, and with Manon. As the eldest, though, I got the brunt of it. The twins, they got off relatively easy. Karen kept pushing me with this abstinence talk, with the constant meeting with Mormon elders, with Sunday School, with all that jazz. Lectures on masturbation, on sexual ‘immorality,’ aka ‘fornication,’ etc.

“At one point, Dad pulled me aside, shook his finger in my face and told me, ‘You don’t want to end up suffering eternal punishment like your wanton whore of a mother, do you?’ I was furious, of course. I told him, and I quote verbatim, ‘I would rather spend eternity with Mom than with you ... and don’t you ever call her that in my presence again.’ I kept asking to just be allowed to move in with you. I even tried to open up a legal case, but no lawyers would take it, Dad and Karen kept sabotaging me, etc.,” I informed Mom now, making her really turn pale as a ghost ... which was fitting, since she was one.

“So ... that’s why you joined the Army right after graduation. To get as far away from Dad ... and Karen, as you could. Mon Dieu! On the other hand, it turned you into one helluva of a strapping young man. I must confess that ... when I first saw you in your uniform, and I’ve never admitted this to anyone before, I was drawn to you in a way that I never was before. I was always secretly drawn to uniforms, you see. My parents, brother, sister, none of them understood this. They were Communists, after all. French Reds are not overly fond of uniforms of that nationalistic sort,” Mom confessed her infatuation with me, something that I wondered about at times, but well, I let it slide.

“Yes, I remember that Grandpa Duclos ... he kept giving me Communist literature that might well have gotten me some very unwanted attention from Homeland Security, even a decade after the Soviet Bloc collapsed. He even left him his own personal copy of Das Kapital, in French, of course, in his will. Irony, using capitalist probate law to pass on a testament of Marxist principles to one’s own grandson, if you think about it. I take it that Marx was wrong, and so were you, that God is real? Do I have to kick him in the nuts for you? Because I will, for your sake. You never did anything to deserve this,” I groused now.

“Yes, I did, Daniel. I smoked three packs of cigarettes a day for fifty years. That’s reason enough to deserve this kind of awful death, which I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. This was the natural consequence of smoking so much for so many years, dear. I don’t regret drinking. I don’t regret coffee. I don’t regret the adultery, trust me.