Highway Princess - 4

Emma walked in her own house like she was a sleepwalker. Carmel walked behind her, looking around. “You have a beautiful place,” she said.
Emma dropped her house keys on the lounge’s coffee table and turned to stare at the strange woman in front of her. The black leather trousers were laced at the side of the legs, showing a lot of skin, and when Carmel turned around admiring the room, Emma caught a complicated tattoo at the base of the older woman’s spine, its centrepiece, unmistakable, a marijuana leaf.
Carmel faced her, smiling.
Her skin was deeply tanned, and her hair showed a black regrowth that faded into platinum blond. She had a ring in her left nostril, and big hoop rings in her ears.
“I did not mean to shock you,” she said, simply.

Emma shook her head. “This is—”
She sighed, and sat down on one of the stuffed chairs. Carmel sat on the couch. She patted the cushions, appreciating the texture.
“Are you really—?”
Carmel looked at her. Beneath the make-up, her skin showed a web of thin lines. Around her mouth, they got deeper when she smiled.
“I am your biological mother,” she said. “Clara and John told you—”
“Of course.”
Her foster parents had told her about her adoption when she had turned sixteen. Emma had not been shocked. She had always known she was somehow out of place. Not that her parents had given her any cause to feel excluded. It was only that she, somehow, had always felt it.
“They told me my mother was too young to keep me—” she said.
“I was sixteen,” Carmel said. “And also—”
She shrugged.
“Also?”
“I was on my way into juvie.”
Emma frowned, then her eyes widened. “You were going to jail?”
“One year of JDC,” Carmel nodded.
Now Emma felt shocked. “What for?”
Carmel shrugged. “For being young. I did a lot of stupid things. Before and after juvie. The only good thing I did was keeping you. And giving you away.”
Emma could feel her heartbeat in her temples. “It’s been thirty years,” she said.
“Twenty-nine,” Carmel said. She took out a pack of cigarettes. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
Emma waved her on, distractedly. Carmel offered her a cigarette, and she refused. She was feeling strange. Disoriented, empty, strange. “Why now?” she asked.
“I read about your job—” Carmel said.
“You read about it?”
“On Clara’s blog. She wrote about you being dropped, three days ago.”
Emma leaned forward. “You read my mother’s blog?”
“Of course.”
A blog about home management, decluttering and recipes. And this big-breasted leather girl read it.
“It was real weird,” Carmel said, taking a drag on her cigarette. “I was in Santa Maria last week. South of the border, nice place. We went to this local celebration, and I got my cards read. The tarot, you know. And this gypsy woman ... the real thing, I mean, she lays it all out for me. Sudden changes, someone from my past needing help. Someone lost and found again. The tower, Death, the chariot. It was uncanny.”
She looked around for a place to drop the ash from her cigarette. Emma gestured for her to go on, and she dropped a chunk of ash on the floor.
“Anyway, I was a bit high at the time, but it really made an impression on me. Like, I was completely hooked. And the following day, I check Clara’s blog, that's sort of my routine, and there she is writing about how her daughter lost a job she’s been doing for five years. Helping people, and making a living. I read how angry Clara was, and imagined how frustrated you must be. And it just—” she snapped her fingers. She had long red fingernails. “—clicked for me. I rode non stop to come here.”
Emma was feeling dizzy, trying to process too many things at the same time. “Rode?”
“My bike. Parked it in the back.”
Emma took a deep breath. Her biological mother was a tattooed, pierced biker that had come all the way from Mexico because a gypsy had read her the tarot while she was high.
“Do you have a place to stay?” she asked, and almost did not believe the sound of her voice.
Carmel winked. “Never had a problem finding a bed to jump in,” she grinned. “That was part of my troubles, I guess.”