I stood on the cracked, weed-framed sidewalk outside the white clapboard house on the busy street in Dorchester where I'd grown up, car keys in hand, and made three promises:

1.   I would not kill my mother

2.   I would not kill myself

3.   And no matter what, I would not talk about that incident in 1998.

My mother came down the porch stairs, toting a massive indestructible-as-hell and black-as-coal Samsonite suitcase in her right hand. "You're seven minutes early," she said, as if arriving early were a crime.

She looked bright and fresh, even though her pixie-faced Anne Klein watch had yet to tick its way to seven o'clock. I, on the other hand, felt like a cat had dragged me out of bed and regurgitated my body onto the concrete.

My mother had dressed for the occasion—as she always dressed for every occasion—in a cream suit with a white blouse, nude hose and dark blue sensible pumps with two-inch heels. She had the pearl studs my father had given her for their tenth anniversary in her ears, her dark brown hair in a stiff pageboy and her crimson-red lipstick bowed in place.

I'd pulled on jeans with ragged cuffs, flip-flops and a faded T-shirt I'd bought in Mexico when Nick and I had gone there on a weekend trip two years ago. My face was bare, my blond hair in a ponytail. My jewelry consisted of a Velcro-strapped water-resistant Timex I'd bought off a street vendor in the Back Bay.

"Good morning to you, too, Ma." I slapped on a smile that cracked my lips. "And I'm early because I couldn't wait to get a start on the trip."

When I was three I told my first lie to my mother, or at least the first one I could remember. That initial snowflake—something about an elephant causing the mess of Barbies in the living room—had added one snowf lake, then another and another until the snowball of lies became a glacier that seemed to sit between us, cold and frozen, as hard to move as Mount Everest.

I told another lie today, because it was easier than saying Nick had given me the final shove out the door, telling me if I didn't get over there now, I'd never go. What had seemed like a good idea last week had quickly turned into something I dreaded as much as a colonoscopy.

My mother and I, Hilary Delaney, were going to make a road trip. When I was eight, the prospect might have sounded good—exciting even—but only because I would have been too young to know better. But now, at thirty-six, the thought of spending a week stuck in a car with my mother, listening to her rehash all the mistakes I'd made in my life, wasn't at all attractive.

I'd become a masochist, I thought as I hefted my mother's suitcase into the tiny trunk of my Ford Mustang. Cherry-red, and impractical as all hell, but mine. I shoved the suitcase this way, and that, trying to squeeze it past my canvas duffel bag and into the tiny trunk.

"Be careful, Hilary. You don't want to dent the suitcase or it'll never close properly."

I blew my bangs off my forehead. "I'm more concerned about denting the car. It took me three years to save enough to buy this."

My mother swept a glance over the Mustang's candy finish, which told me in a half a second what she thought of that purchase. "You should have bought something more practical. A sedan at least. You know red two-doors are the most—"

"Stolen cars in America. Yeah, I do. And I still wanted it. Maybe I was having a midlife crisis. Or a really long stretch of PMS." I wrestled the Samsonite some more.

"You can hardly fit a thing in that trunk. If you had a Chrysler, like Deloris Christenson, you could—"

"Maybe if someone had brought a smaller suitcase, this wouldn't be such a problem."

And then, the Samsonite decided to settle the argument for us. It slid in with a final heave and plopped into the trunk. My mother gave me one of her "I was right" smiles of satisfaction and I gave her one of mine right back.

A draw.

Nicholas Warner, my on-again, off-again, now-sorta-off boyfriend, would say this trip was some deep-seated need to settle things with my mother, so I could finally grow up.

He was right, damn him.

As much as I tried to be an adult, I still felt like a kindergartener around the woman who had shaped my formative years. I was here, not just to be a taxi driver to my Uncle Morty's house in San Francisco, but to find that missing key— the one that unlocked the secret to why I'd inherited dysfunction, along with her blue eyes and fondness for fried clams.

I didn't actually intend to have a conversation about the past. Rather, I'd devised a nice, elaborate backdoor plan to skate around the issues.

Actually touching them with words?

There weren't enough miles on Planet Earth for that.

This was also a chance to put some distance between Nick and me, and his sudden detour into a serious relationship, which took me down a path I didn't want to travel. The girl was supposed to be the one hinting around at churches and preachers, not the guy. But Nick wanted more, and I didn't, which made me push the "off" button between us and agree to this insane trip with my mother.

As a diversion, I'd brought not one, but four books on tape and a dozen new CDs of music that I thought she'd like and knew I'd hate. I had a roadside emergency kit, a brand-new, responsible-as-hell AAA membership and a cell phone. I was as prepared as I could be.

I'd planned for everything. Except Reginald.

He came trotting out of the house, little hooves clacking on the wood porch, before he lumbered down the four front steps, his backside teeter-tottering like a Weeble from side to side as he crossed the sidewalk, then used the crumbled curb as a stepstool into my car. He settled himself in the backseat and began snorting and rooting at the black vinyl, as if I had some truffles beneath the springs. I shuddered and bit back a wave of revulsion.

"No. No, no, no!" I put up my hands, warding off the pig from hell, "I will not bring THAT PIG along."

There was no other way to talk about my mother's potbellied pig but in capital letters. Babe he was not.

"That pig? He's my best friend, dear," Ma said, innocent, high-pitched. "He has to come. Whither thou goest, Reginald goest, too."

"I thought you made arrangements with the vet."

"I tried, I really did. But once I got there with Reginald, and saw that cage they planned to put him in…" My mother heaved a sigh. "I just couldn't do it. So I packed his bags and here we are!" She lifted the handle on the passenger's side door and settled herself inside the car.

For a woman who has climbed the career ladder with single-minded determination, my mother is insane when it comes to her pig. I don't get it. It's as if she puts all her immaturity into her relationship with Reginald. There's simply no dealing with her when she starts to baby him, doing things like grinding his pig chow into miniscule pieces so he won't choke. I have tried explaining to her that he has a mouth the size of the Grand Canyon, but still, she treats him like a two-year-old. She even has a comprehensive health plan for him and a plot picked out in Lazy Daisy's Pet Cemetery.

She'd bought him after she retired two years ago, when I told her she needed to find something to do—something besides calling me three times a day to tell me how to run my life. I'd meant she should join the horticultural society or start scrapbooking or look into rental properties in Florida, not fall in love with a mammal that starred on platters at restaurants.

My mother put her boxy navy purse on her lap, clamped her hands over the clasp, sat ramrod straight and stared at the road ahead of us, showing me the debate was over and that she was ready to go.

When my father used to take us all to the Stop & Shop, she'd always assumed the same position, as if somewhere along the way, she had seen a billboard of a mom in a car and decided that was how it was supposed to be done.

"Ma…" I began, trying to fit in another protest toward Reginald before I got in the car and made him a permanent part of the journey. But I knew it was a losing battle. Anything with my mother was a losing battle. Rosemary Delaney was a former defense attorney—a very successful attorney—and she could debate everything from toilet paper choices to murder weapons quite literally to death.

Before retiring, she'd made it to the top of her field, even becoming a partner at Fitzsimmons and Wilson, but she had never learned to drive. She got her master's degree by taking the bus to Suffolk University. She went to work by train, taking the subway downtown every day for thirty-two years. She's a woman who can understand the most complicated laws in the Massachusetts legal system and argue them in front of the sternest judge in America, but had always been too terrified to conquer Park-Reverse-Neutral-Drive.

It's like she only took the parts of the women's lib movement she liked and left the rest stuck in a fifties time warp.

My mother reached behind herself for the seat belt, buckled it, then reseated her purse on her lap. "Well? Are we going to get started? Or just sit here and let the neighbors stare?"

I reminded myself again of my no-homicide, no-suicide pact.

Our trip was going to take a minimum of five days to reach California, figuring in stops for sleeping and eating. I would have driven all day, but knew my mother wouldn't hear of it. For one, she'd start to lecture me on all the horrible things that could happen if I sat in the driver's seat for too long— lockjaw, nerve damage, insanity. For another, Reginald would undoubtedly need frequent potty breaks, which would mean letting him christen every rest stop between Massachusetts and San Francisco.

And I'd be left standing by the PETS AREA: PLEASE CLEAN UP AFTER YOUR FURRY FRIEND sign, grinning like I didn't mind and secretly steaming inside because I'd be the one doing the furry-friend poop patrol. My mother had actually hired someone to be her backyard pooper-scooper, because as much as she loved Reginald, she didn't love the things that came out of him and had never scooped a poop in her life. That left me to do the dirty work on this trip, unless I could convince that guy from The Discovery Channel to come along and do his "Dirty Jobs" show from the backseat of my car.

My mother was self-sufficient, smart and—

A huge pain in the ass.

My ass, in particular.

Still, she was my mother and I loved her. Ever since my father died five years ago, I'd tried…well, more or less, to build a closer relationship with her. She was my only living immediate relative in a hundred-mile radius. And, she was my mother. But trying to get close to her was like trying to hug a cactus. She just wasn't that kind of person.

She never had been. I accepted that. It was what I knew, and I was, after all, thirty-six, way past the age where I needed someone to fix my boo-boos and give them a kiss to make it better. I was all grown up and cool with it.

Then why was I suddenly so damned nervous about the prospect of having to converse with the woman who'd given me life?

It was only a few days, I reminded myself as I got behind the wheel, buckled my seat belt even as my mother reminded me to, and started the Mustang.

Behind me, Reginald began grunting and oinking, his black-and-white body shaking and shimmying like John Travolta in the seventies, then he let out a gassy bomb that gave new meaning to the words "going nuclear."

It was going to be a long ride.

Reginald apparently hadn't thought to go before we left. We were barely onto I-93—not even in sight of the turnpike yet— before he started to make whiny noises and pace the backseat, his hooves leaving crescent-shaped dents in the vinyl. I exited the highway then searched for a good ten minutes for a shrub that wouldn't make Reginald wince. According to my mother, Reginald had a boxwood phobia and a shy bladder, so I had to keep walking into the thick woods along the highway, searching for a suitable shrub for his purposes.

I was waiting for Reginald to make his deposit, or whatever it was that a pig would do, when my cell phone rang. "How are you holding up?" Nick asked. I missed him already, but wasn't going to tell him, because being "off" meant not being needy.

"No one's dead yet, not even the pig. I count that as a victory, considering we left ten minutes ago."

Nick groaned. "She brought her pig?" Nick was very familiar with Reginald, after a nearly-disastrous babysitting incident a few months ago, when my mother had gone on a girls' weekend with her Bingo buds, Erma and Rhonda, to a bed and breakfast that didn't allow porcine pals. It had been her one and only trip sans Reginald.

"Of course she brought him. They're pretty much attached at the hip."

"You poor thing." He chuckled, then sobered. "Anyway, Hil, I called you for a reason."

The way he said it, I knew I didn't want to hear the words. For a second, I considered hanging up the phone, feigning a bad connection. Considering only a few suburbs of Boston separated us, I doubted he was going to fall for that.

"Nick, can we not—"

"Hilary, I should have said this before you left this morning, but you ran out the door so fast, I never got a chance."

"I was in a rush, which was partly your fault." I'd spent the night at Nick's place, intending to stay long enough for him to cook me breakfast and entice me to chuck the whole road-trip idea, pleading typhoid or something equally convenient. The majority of me had wanted to opt for a weekend in bed with the man I hadn't seen nearly enough of lately, or at the very least, go back to bed for seconds.