Mama had just turned sixty, and you’d think by the time a woman reached that age, she’d be at least a little bit mature. Not my mama. She was as immature as any ten-year-old, maybe worse than some. Of course, she’d always been that way. The entire time I was growing up, Mama was constantly suffering from what Daddy called “wild hairs up her ass,” first one then another, so that none of us, not my daddy and certainly not her three children, ever knew what to expect from the woman when we woke up on any given morning of the week.

I remember being in Mrs. Gladys Wilson’s tenth-grade English class and reading some story by this guy called Thoreau. When we got to the part where he said we ought to let a person march to his own drummer, all I could think about was my mama and how my daddy was always letting her do whatever popped into her head. Not that anyone could call what my mama did marching. No, for her, it was this constant gyrating and rotating all over the place; and one thing for sure, her poor family got downright exhausted from watching her, not to mention dizzy as hell.

For starters, Mama had had so many “careers” that I couldn’t begin to count them, if I wanted to, which I didn’t. Sold World Book Encyclopedias and Avon cosmetics door to door. Hosted Tupperware parties. Substituted at the county schools. Managed a mobile home dealership. Cashiered at Piggly Wiggly. Wrote for the local newspaper. Hell, at one time, she even started a housecleaning business with her best friend, Loretta Pascal, though the business didn’t last too long because of what Mama called “creative differences” between her and Loretta that were putting “too big a strain on the relationship.” Then, after my sister, brother, and I all finished our educations and moved out on our own, Mama decided she would return to school. Didn’t even tell Daddy she’d been thinking about it, just up and enrolled at the university, then announced over supper, “Owen, I’m going to college,” like she was saying “Pass the mashed potatoes, please.” Of course, that’s how mama always was—just chock full of surprises.

Knowing just how, well, unpredictable she was, I guess her latest undertaking shouldn’t have surprised me in the least, but it did. In fact, when I got off the phone after talking with Daddy, I just sat down at the kitchen table and shook my head in disbelief. What in the bloody hell is wrong with that woman, I wondered. Sixty years old and what was she up to now? Why, Francine Renee Brooks had died her gray hair black, bought a big used GMC pickup truck, and head off to Alaska. And there was my daddy, sitting there back at the house, crying in his Budweiser, and begging me to go find the crazy woman and bring her back home to Palmetto, Georgia.

“Harley,” I told my husband as soon as he walked through the door that evening, “Guess what? Mama’s gone off to Alaska, and I gotta go find her.”

Harley froze in his tracks, one foot on the porch, the other inside the kitchen. “What?” he said, which was obviously the best response he could manage.

“You heard me. I gotta go—”

“To Alaska, I know,” he said and finally stepped all the way inside the house, closing the door and walking over to the sink, where he clanked his lunch pail onto the counter. “So when you leaving?”

That was Harley for you—always did take pretty much any event in stride. Then again, I guess since we’d been together for twenty-three years and married for twenty of those years, he’d gotten accustomed to my mama’s shenanigans.

I shrugged. “Don’t know, but I guess as soon as I can pack and take care of a few chores.” I was already figuring what I needed to get done before I could leave, like stocking the fridge and the pantry, given Harley wasn’t much for shopping.

Harley’s next question was, “Where’s she headed to in Alaska.”

I shrugged again. “Daddy’s not sure, but he thinks maybe Moose Jaw.”

“Moose Jaw?” Harley frowned. “Never heard of it.”

“Me neither,” I said. “But Daddy said he found a bunch of files she had saved on the computer, and most of them contained information about some place called Moose Jaw. Seems it’s somewhere north of Anchorage.”

“What’s she gonna do there?” Harley asked.

Here came the hard part. I looked down at the floor and said, “Daddy thinks she’s been having one of the those Internet romances with some guy who lives up there. Says he found some love letters, well, love e-mails saved in another file.”

Harley’s eyes widened. He was obviously shocked, and for him, that was totally out of character. Like I said before, Harley was pretty easygoing and not easily taken aback, especially when it came to my mama. “Ah, come on,” he finally said. “You gotta be kidding. Your mama, old as she is?”

“Yeah,” I said, “my mama, all right, all sixty years of her.”

“Well,” Harley said, shaking his head again. “Why can’t Bubba go after her?”

Bubba was my brother, and I knew Bubba wasn’t about to leave his new wife (his third) and go traipsing off up to Alaska, especially not since he and Arlene were expecting within the next two weeks. Even if that weren’t the case, I still doubted Bubba would go fetch Mama, seeing how the two of them had experienced a little falling out about a month ago over what Mama called “a little difference of opinion” when Bubba wanted her to draw up a will and she said she wasn’t old enough to think about dying and didn’t appreciate him reminding her of her mortality. Bubba tried to remind her how if she died without a will, the state would decide who got what, not her. She said she didn’t much care. “Let the state give it all to the Humane Society,” she said, “or the Salvation Army, for that matter. Once I’m dead, it might as well go to good use.”

“But what about Daddy?” Bubba asked. “And what about us, your kids, your own flesh and blood?”

“Humph,” she replied. “Owen’s got his pension plan, and the house is in his name. He sure doesn’t need my stuff. And as for you children, you don’t need it either. You all got good jobs and plenty of stuff of your own.”

And that had closed the topic to discussion, mainly because Mama had gone marching off into the bedroom and closed the door. But Bubba, none too happy with her “irresponsible attitude,” had been peeved with her ever since and refused to come by, even when she baked his favorite dish, her famous sweet potato casserole, and that was a sure sign he was holding a grudge.

“You know Bubba ain’t gonna go,” I told Harley.

He just nodded.

“And don’t even mention Raylene, ‘cause she’s not gonna go neither. You know she has panic attacks if she drives any farther from home than the Piggly Wiggly.” Raylene was my older sister, and she was another story entirely.

Harley nodded again.

“So,” I said, “that leaves me. I gotta go fetch my mama and bring her back from Alaska before she does something foolish.”

“Sounds like she already has,” Harley mumbled.

“Yep, I guess it does,” I said. “But I still gotta go. Don’t ask me why, but Daddy loves the woman; and if he goes off to Alaska, I know he’ll probably kill the guy she’s being carrying on with over the Internet. And the last thing I wanna see is my seventy-year-old Daddy sitting behind bars.”

And so it was settled. I had to go to Moose Jaw, Alaska, and bring my black-haired, truck-driving, senior-citizen of a mama back to Palmetto, Georgia. And I had to do it even if she kicked, screamed, and clawed each and every mile of the way.