My hands shake as I climb in my unlocked car and rifle under the driver’s seat in search of my keys.

I find the giant screwdriver. Yes, that is my “keys.” The original key broke off in the lock a few months ago and my mechanic—AKA my dad—stripped out the lock and now I shove a giant flathead screwdriver into the ignition and turn and pray.

That’s the closest thing in my life to something being inserted into a hole every day.

The car turns over and I gun the engine. After backing up slowly, the car vibrates as I make a right turn onto the main road and head to the office.

The vibrations aren’t from the car, which runs smoothly once you actually get it started. Those are my nerves jangling a mile a minute, my body in some kind of post-urinal shock.

I examine my hand. The toilet hand. And then I lean back and feel a bulge at the base of my back. And not the fun kind.

Dirty hand reaches back and finds my sweaty smartphone. The screen is not glowing, and it seems to have developed a sheen of sweat. Or maybe that’s from me. Running from the restaurant to my car was about the most exercise I’ve had in months.

As the familiar roads come into view and I guide my car on autopilot back to my apartment, I try to unwind the crazy, jumbled mess of threaded thoughts that can’t untangle just yet. Hot guy. Hiding in the men’s room. Dropping my phone in the toilet. Being caught with my hand in there. Being rescued and dripping toilet juice on Hot Guy.

And that was the good part of the morning.

My phone makes a creepy bleating sound, like baby seals dying at slaughter. The screen flickers like it’s the last known electronic signal after nuclear war.

I try to shut it off but it just continues making an anemic whirring sound. This is what robots sound like when they die. The noise will invade my dreams for the next few weeks.

A deep breath will cleanse me. No dice. How about two? Nope. Nuthin’. Ten don’t really help. By the time I’ve tried twenty-three deep breaths, I am home and feeling a little faint, with tingly lips.

Let’s not add syncope to my growing list of Very Bad Things That Happen on a Mystery Shop.

I park in my assigned spot next to the trash cans, kill the engine, and slowly bang my forehead against the steering wheel. Twenty-three bangs actually calm me. Dented brow and all. By the time I stop, I feel like I can handle a basic shower.

That’s more than I was capable of ten minutes ago. Other than a shower with Mr. Suit.

Who are you, a voice asks me, and what have you done with asexual Shannon?

Sitting out here with my dented head and confused heart won’t get me anywhere. Amanda’s probably frantically trying to find me, and a search party worthy of a missing Malaysian jet is about to be triggered if she calls my mom.

My mom can be a bit dramatic. A bit. The way Miley Cyrus can be a bit controversial.

I sprint into my house, holding the phone like it’s a bomb. My apartment is a garage. Mostly. I live above a two-car garage in a neighborhood right behind a college, a one-bedroom place I share with my sister. It requires actual exertion on my part to enter and exit. Twenty-seven nearly vertical steps get me to my front door. An actual key (as opposed to a screwdriver) opens the front door, and then bam!

I’m assaulted by a glaring cat.

My cat makes Grumpy Cat look like Rainbow Brite. If glares could peel paint, I could hire out Chuckles to a paint contractor and quit my job, living off my pet’s singular skill.

People who think animals have expressionless faces are like people who can ignore an open package of Oreos.

Not quite human.

Chuckles—who probably started glaring after we named him as a puffball kitten ten years ago—sits primly in front of the door, a sentry serving as witness to some oversight of mine.

With a guilty look, I survey my kitchen, which is the first room you walk into in my apartment. Water dish full. Food dish half full.

Litter box—full.

Ah. “I’m sorry, Chuckles. I was too busy putting my hand down a human toilet today. I’ve had quite enough of excrement today. But I’ll change it anyhow, because if you look at me like that much longer I’ll burst into flame and they’ll find us in a few weeks, you noshing on my crispy legs.”

“You should think about the fact that you say more to your cat than you do to your own mother,” Satan says from behind my ficus plant.

I scream. Chuckles screams. I pick up Chuckles and fling him at the plant, which serves exactly three purposes. First, it reveals my stupidity. Second, it makes Chuckles plot my death on a whole new level. And third, it makes my mother sidestep the whole fiasco with the fluid movement of a woman who teaches yoga, leaving her to glare at me with a look that makes me realize exactly where Chuckles learned it from.

“Nice guard cat,” my mom says. She holds her purse over her shoulder and keys in her hand. “Before you ask,” she adds as I press my palm over my heart, willing it to stay in place as Chuckles’ death ray of magnetic harm tries to pry it out of me, “Amanda called and told me she couldn’t reach you.”

“I’ve been unavailable by phone for no more than thirty minutes. Thirty minutes! And she sends out the National Guard.”

Mom looks triumphant. Marie Jacoby is what all my friends called a MILFF—Mother I’d Like to Flee From. A little too tan, a little too blond, a lot too judgmental. My mother doesn’t greet you with “Hello.”

“You should” is her salutation of choice.

“You should consider yourself fortunate. Some young girls would be falling all over themselves to have a mother who cares so much,” she grouses.

“First off, I’m not a girl. And second, you’re right. How about I sell you on eBay as mother of the year? You’d fetch a great price.”

One eyebrow shoots up. One perfectly threaded eyebrow, that is. No stray hair can live on Mom’s face. She visits the mall weekly and the women at the threading spa not only know her by name, they know her preferred coffee order from the little espresso place next to the escalator.

She peers intently at me, her eyes that luminous sapphire I still envy. I got dad’s dirt-brown eyes. “You’ve met someone,” she crows, plopping her oversized fake Prada bag on my scarred thrift shop table.

Which means she is here to talk.

“How do you do that?” I screech, channeling the same inner fifteen-year-old she can conjure at will with just two sentences and one knowing look.

Her eyebrow climbs higher. “So I’m right.” She stands and gives my coffee machine an appraising look. It is an espresso machine I’d gotten on a mystery shop for a high-end cookware store. “Make me a coffee and I’ll only ask the basics.”

“Blackmailer,” I mutter, but I know the score. Do this and she’ll leave me alone. Argue and I am in for the full hover-mother treatment that makes the NSA look like Spy Kids.

I grab the can of ground espresso out of the cabinet above the sink and she makes a guttural sound of reproach. Ignoring her, I fill the machine and make sure there is enough water. Sometimes, pretending she didn’t make a noise works.

But not this time.

“Look at the food in your cabinets! Coffee. Sugar and sweetener packets. Ketchup and soy sauce packets. Sample-size cookies. Teeny packages of microwave popcorn.”

“I eat a perfectly fine diet, Mom,” I mutter as the machine begins to hiss. Or maybe that’s me. It’s hard to tell.

She waves a perfectly manicured hand dismissively. The nail polish matches a thin line of mauve that runs as a single stripe through her shirt.

“Not for you. For the man you’ll entertain! He can’t see that. That’s not wife and mother material. No woman who makes a good wife keeps a pantry like that!”

“Last week you were Feminist Crusader Mom, telling me how proud you were that I finished my degree and support myself!” This is a well-worn argument. Since she turned fifty a little more than two years ago, and as her friends are all getting to Momzilla their way through their daughters’ weddings, Mom has become zealously devoted to finding me A Man.

Not just any man, though.

A man worthy of a Farmington Country Club wedding.

Mom’s phone rings. “You Sexy Thing” fills the room and Chuckles makes a disapproving sound eerily similar to my mother’s. I seize my chance.

“Gotta wash the toilet water off my arm!” I call back as I pad to the bathroom and turn on the shower, drowning out whatever comments she peppers me with. Stripping out of the pajamas I’ve been wearing for far longer than their shelf life feels like shedding a skin.

The tiny, hot pinpricks of escapism give me ten minutes to cleanse myself and to think. Or not think. Mom chats on the other side of the bathroom door, blissfully unaware that I am not listening. Or commenting. Or responding in any way, shape, or form.

That doesn’t stop her.

I turn off the shower spray and hear her shout, “And so that’s how Janice’s daughter found out her and her husband’s toothbrushes had been shoved up the robbers’ butts.”

Whoa. As I towel off, my reflection opens its mouth and closes it a few times, wondering how I am expected to respond to that.

Some things are best left to the unknown.

As I open the door, a plume of steam hits Mom. “My hair! My hair!” she shouts. I inherited her limp hair and Dad’s eyes, which is so totally backwards. Dad has lush hair that my sister, Amy, got—perfect spiral curls that rest elegantly in auburn tendrils against her back. And Mom has those blue eyes.

I look in the mirror and Declan’s name runs through my mind, planted there by my subconscious. If I say a word about him to Mom then she’ll be planning the wedding and have him in a headlock, demanding a two-carat ring before he can say “Hello.”

I walk into my bedroom wearing a towel, and stop short. Clothes are laid out on my bed for me.

“What am I? Four?” I mumble. Then I grudgingly put them on, because Mom does have good taste. The adobe shirt she pairs with navy pants and a scarf I never use looks more stylish than I want to admit.

“I can color code your wardrobe for you, Shannon,” she shouts from the hallway as I dress.

“You should start a clothing line. Garanimals for Adults. It would be very popular!”

She takes my comment at face value. “What a great idea! I’ll ask Amy what she thinks. Maybe we can do one of those crowd-funding things to raise money for it like Amy does.”

Amy is an intern at a venture capital company. So not the same thing as Kickstarter or Indiegogo. I don’t correct Mom, because it’s about as useful as correcting Vladimir Putin about the Ukrainian/Russian border.

“Who was on the phone?” I ask.

“Amanda. She wants you to call her. What’s wrong with your phone?”

“I dropped it in a toilet on a shop this morning.”

Mom’s face freezes in an outrageous O. “You didn’t…retrieve it?” The only thing Mom fears more than never marrying off a kid at the Farmington Country Club is germs.

“I stuck my hand in the toilet in the men’s room and saved it, even as I flushed!” I say with glee.

She glares at me. Chuckles leaves the room, clearly outclassed. “Men’s room?”

I smile. “Where do you think I’m meeting men?”

“Oh, Shannon,” she groans, reaching for the espresso I made for her before the shower. It’s likely tepid by now, but that’s how she likes it. “Have you become so desperate?”

“I know the men’s room is a bit—“

“No—the men’s room is ingenious, actually. No competition, except with the gay ones.” She drinks the entire espresso in one gulp and slams the cup down like it’s a shot competition during Spring Break in New Orleans. “I mean, really? On a mystery shop?” She says the last two words like Gwyneth Paltrow says the word divorce.

“So let me understand, Mom. Trolling the men’s room is a clever way to meet a man, but doing so during a mystery shop is debasing?” She quickly pulls my unruly hair into an updo and bobby pins appear in her mouth like she had them shoved up her nose the entire time, waiting for the perfect moment to correct my hairstyle.

“It’s just…” She sniffs. “What kind of man will you meet at a burger joint? Or a car wash? Getting your oil changed or buying a bagel sandwich?” Her face perks up. “Is there an elite level of mystery shopping? Who are the secret shoppers for Neiman Marcus, or the Omni Parker House? What about Tiffany’s?” Her eyes glitter. “Now that would be one way to meet the right kind of man.”

“The right kind of man.” I can’t keep the disdain out of my voice, but an image of Declan flashes through my mind. That smile.

“You won’t meet him on your eighth bagel sandwich dressed like a college student on the fourth day of exams with a bad case of lice,” she adds.

“I don’t have lice!”

“Well, honey, you looked like it.”

“Mom.” I steel myself. “This has been great. Really. But I have to go.” I grab my purse and throw a few cups of white rice in a baggie, then shove my phone in it. “But I need to get to work.”

“We need to talk, Shannon—”

“Bye! And change Chuckles’ litter box for me, would you? He looks like he’s about to go in the zen rock garden.”

And with that, I run down every one of those twenty-seven steps, grateful for my escape.