During my second date with Miranda, at an Asian fusion restaurant called Bamboo Circle (multiculturalism rules!), I decide to tell her My Mom Story. I tend not to reveal anything too personal about myself so soon in the dating cycle, but I’ve started growing serious about Miranda—very serious. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met so far on BrainyDate.com: hypnotic brown eyes, plump crimson lips, tawny skin, thick black hair cascading halfway down her back, and a trim figure with a sloping, porn-quality rear. Her empathy also appeals to me, for she works as an assistant director for the Rostrand Initiative, a charitable organization (created by a couple of Silicon Valley billionaires) that covers tuition and travel and other expenses for Third-Worlders (many of them female) who want to study business (with a Western free-market emphasis) at America’s finest schools; the students often return home after graduating to put what they’ve learned into practice, either teaching others or starting companies or both. As she told me during our first date, at Guessed Room Coffee, she’d had her “pick of a million higher-paying jobs” after graduating with her MBA five years ago from that prestigious private university in the tonier part of town, but that she’d wanted “to make a difference, as corny as that sounds, by helping improve the minds—and the economic conditions—in developing countries.” Plus probably due “to the non-socialist aspect of the curriculum, ha ha,” the Trump administration hasn’t had much problem with these immigrants, so, “knock wood,” two words Miranda says as she raps on her forehead a few times.
Anyway, the Mom Story. My mother called me one evening to share what she called “very special news.” She said she’d met someone: a guy named Colin at Sir Reads-a-Lot, the local used bookstore where she bought her gardening books. (She’d always had a vast library of gardening books, though I’d never seen anything grow at our house over the years other than the size of her false eyelashes, which now extended an inch or two in front of her face. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her actual eyelashes.) She said she’d fallen in love with him at first sight; in fact, she’d immediately known for sure he was the love of her life. (When I was sixteen, my parents divorced after fifteen years of marriage due to that all-purpose reason, irreconcilable differences.) She’d been involved with him for about a month, and she wanted me to meet him, so a few days later, the three of us had dinner at a place she’d suggested, the Bulging Platter, my favorite restaurant as a child; my family had seemed at its happiest whenever it dined there. I myself still went there occasionally; it still looked the same, with those Southwestern-style, adobe-colored interior walls that had reminded the much-younger me of camels, even after I’d learned that camels didn’t live in the Southwest. We even sat at my family’s favorite booth, next to the giant plastic fern in the red plastic vase.
Colin was fifty-nine, the same age as my mother. He had a craggy face and short, graying blonde hair. He had biceps that strained against the sleeves of his green polo shirt. He used to teach electrical engineering at the local college, till he took an early retirement four years earlier. He now spent his time writing, having self-published two books about his former field—books aimed, as he put it, “at a target audience who doesn’t know a thing about electrical-related matters, except for how to change a lightbulb without too much difficulty, maybe just occasionally burning down a couple blocks in the process.”
I thought he was smart, funny, and friendly. I liked him a lot. Plus I could tell he loved my mother in return, for he kept rubbing her hand on the table with great care while staring at her as protectively as she did with him.
Half an hour later, during our entrees, he mentioned that he felt comfortable enough with me to bring up something he usually didn’t talk about with strangers. Something “not exactly uncontroversial,” but he thought I had “enough brains to take it without swooning backwards onto the old fainting couch.” He had almost finished writing his “latest and greatest book”: “a revisionist historical study” called Give or Take Six Million, about the Holocaust.
Uh-oh.
I asked what he meant by “revisionist.” He replied that the book, “using newly-discovered evidence,” would “examine whether or not a so-called Nazi genocide against the Jews had actually occurred.” Sure, he didn’t deny the Nazis had killed some Jews, but, based on that newly-discovered evidence he’d spoken of, and based of the findings of others “in the revisionist community”—well, in his “humble opinion,” it seemed “pretty unlikely the Nazis had singled out that particular religion for, you know, special treatment at such an extreme level.” He wanted to communicate this argument, again, to an audience who didn’t know a thing about the topic at hand. An audience who didn’t know “about the absence of legitimate German documents related to an alleged Holocaust.” An audience who’d never heard “about the lack of Zyklon-B residue on the walls of the alleged gas chambers at Auschwitz.” An audience whose ignorance had resulted from Holocaust movies, particularly Schindler’s List by the director Steven Spielberg, “one guess as to what his religion is.”
I didn’t guess.
“Look, I have nothing against the Jews, nor do I have a particular interest in National Socialism,” Colin said. “But I do have an interest in the truth. You should know the truth about the past, no matter your race or religion. After all, the past influences everything that follows it. Sorry if I still sound like a college instructor.”
No one said anything for a moment.
“And by the way,” Colin continued, “though I’m obviously not a fan of Schindler’s List, I do give three thumbs up to the Spielberg movie that preceded it, a little something you might have heard of called Jurassic Park. Those dinosaurs look so real.”
“Yes, they do,” my mother said.
I asked her if she agreed with Colin’s views about the Holocaust, and she said absolutely, she’d read his book and agreed with every word; she’d always had “this nagging feeling that the Holocaust was a little improbable, anyway, what with all those logistics and stuff.”
Yeah, the Germans aren’t known for caring about logistics and stuff, I retorted.
She thought I should off on judging him till I actually read his book. She thought Colin wrote very well, in “nontechnical language, with no academic jargon” His book would cause “open-minded Jews to reexamine their beliefs.” When I was growing up, I’d never heard her say anything anti-Semitic, because I’d never heard her say anything at all related to any ethnic group (though I had heard her occasionally tsk-tsk the inner-city blacks she’d seen on the TV news, but I guess almost everyone tsk-tsked them back then).
I told my mother as calmly as possible that I loved her, but that she was fucking crazy, and that Colin was fucking crazier, and that she shouldn’t contact me at all, at all, until after she’d come to her senses about the Holocaust and dumped that Nazi asshole to the curb, where garbage belongs. That was the first time I’d ever used profanities in front of her. If what I’d said had made her angry, she gave no indication of it, instead smiling a faint smile as I got up from our booth and Colin started chuckling. Suppressing the urge to smash his face in, I walked out of the restuaurant.
That was twelve years ago. I haven’t contacted her since or vice-versa. I drove by her house, the house I’d grown up in, a few years ago just to check it out and saw it no longer existed, nothing left but a grassy, weedy patch of land. Since then, I’ve looked her up on the Internet a few times but have found nothing—no social-media posts, no address, no phone number, no obituary. Nothing about Colin, either, or any of his books, including the Holocaust one, if he ever published that. Maybe she married him. Maybe they’re still married. I could go to the courthouse to look through the marriage records, or the death records, or both. Yes, I could. Yes.
Having finished My Mom Story, I look at Miranda. “Um, so do you want to contact them?” she asks.
Hell no, I reply.
“So why do you care about them?”
I don’t care about him, I care about her. She is my mother.
“Sure, I understand, you still love her, but you made the right decision by cutting her out of your life. You seem to be obsessing over her, something that—”
As Miranda psychoanalyzes me, I realize that my seriousness has repulsed her, that she can empathize with people from thousands of miles away, but she has no interest in a Yank like me who wants to reestablish control over his life; who doesn’t want to know where his mother and his possible stepfather are, even if they are Holocaust deniers? Maybe Miranda has no control over her own life, maybe by choice; she could masochistically enjoy being a pawn. Or maybe she carts around her own gargantuan familial baggage and doesn’t need to cart around mine. Whatever the case, I know she’s started pulling away from me, that I’ve bummed her out, but why should someone not get bummed out every once in a while? We don’t live in a fantasyland.
I tell Miranda that I agree with her, that I need to quit obsessing about my mother, et cetera, et cetera. “Glad to hear that,” Miranda says in a sweet voice. Later that night, we have sex at my place (the same event that had happened during our first date), but I know she’s just about finished pulling away, for she grinds against me even louder and more vigorously than she did last time. Lying under her on my bed, I doubt she’s faking her orgasm, for she seems too guileless for that type of performance, judging from the non-carnal experiences we’ve shared together. She must want to end our involvement with a bang, pun intended; an intense sexual experience makes a great going-away present.
Copyright © 2026 by David V. Matthews
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 