She says this as if I actually know the real date of her birth. My eyes are in danger of falling out of their sockets. I already knew that Syrena live to be hundreds of years old. That they age well. Sure, Mom has a few grays streaking her hair. Some wrinkles tugging at her blue eyes. But she doesn’t look like the moldy four years old she’s claiming.

She presses her lips together as the waitress sets a bottle of syrup on the table. When she leaves again, Mom says, “That’s it? No more questions?”

Oh, but there are. “How did you really meet Dad?” I realize then that I feel a sense of disconnection with my life. That if Mom isn’t who I thought she was, then Dad couldn’t possibly be, either. The story was always that they met in college and fell in love at first sight. Now that I reflect on it, the whole story sounds like a generic, all-purpose romance. Boring and cliché and BS.

Mom nods, as if I asked the right question. “We met years after I’d come ashore. I was selling souvenirs on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, and at night I worked at a freak show.” She grins. “As a mermaid.”

I gasp and she laughs. “Oh, not a real one, mind you,” she says, eyes full of nostalgia. “They dressed me up in this ridiculous costume with a sequined fin and had me swim around a huge tank and wave at the tourists. The ring leader—Oliver was his name—liked that I could hold my breath for a long time.” She shrugs. “It was pretty cheesy, but it was easy money.”

“So you weren’t in college.”

“I wasn’t, no.” She takes another sip. “Your father was though. He was visiting for spring break. I mugged him.”

“You what?”

“You have to understand I didn’t make very much money, even with two jobs. It hardly even paid for my food. I couldn’t fish, because—”

“You didn’t want anyone to sense you in the water.” Otherwise, she could have been pretty self-sufficient.

She nods. “So one day I see this group of cocky college students, spending money left and right. Pulling wads of cash out of their pockets to pay for small purchases, like ice cream.” She rolls her eyes. “They were flashing it. They wanted people to know they were rich.”

“Doesn’t mean they wanted people to mug them,” I mutter.

Mom shrugs. “No, but they were trying to attract attention from the ladies, so I made sure to act interested. Your dad was one of them. I’d seen him before. He came to the freak show a lot and just sat there and watched me. Boy, did he make me feel uncomfortable. After a while, he got up the guts to ask me on a date, and all I could think was that a free dinner sounded fabulous. He took me to a nice restaurant and a picture show—that’s what we called movies back then. Afterward, he insisted on walking me home, but since I didn’t have a home to walk to, I made up an address and let him walk me to it. That’s when he told me he’d seen me breathing underwater, in the tank.”

The waitress interrupts then, setting Mom’s pancakes in front of her, and lowering a tower of beef and cheese and bread in front of me. “You all set, then?” Agnes says.

Mom and I nod. “Let me know if you need anything else,” Agnes continues. “Lester just pulled a strawberry pie out of the oven, and it’d be downright sinful if you didn’t try it.” With an awkward wink, she leaves.

“I want strawberry pie,” I tell Mom, shaking the ketchup bottle for my fries. “It’s the least you could do.”

Mom smiles and steals a fry from my plate. “Agreed. Maybe I’ll have a piece, too.”

I eye her pancakes doubtfully. “So anyway. What do you mean he saw you breathing underwater?”

“Well, you know we draw water into our lungs, and get oxygen from it, right?” She lowers her voice to an almost-whisper.

I nod. Dr. Milligan had told us that, after studying Galen. I wonder if Dad discovered this feature of Syrena lung function while studying Mom.

“I tried to be discreet about doing it, you know, taking small breaths, or going to the opposite side of the tank. But somehow he noticed.” She drizzles the pancakes with syrup for what seems like a decade. Then she sets to cutting them up. “Well, that officially ended our date, to say the least. But more than that, it meant I had to leave the boardwalk. I couldn’t risk him blowing my cover—though, when I think about it, I’m not sure how he would have proved it—but I didn’t have the resources to leave on my own. So I pulled a gun on him and demanded his wallet.”

The soda in my mouth becomes the soda in my nose. “You had a gun?” I cough and sputter into my napkin.

Mom’s eyes go round and she presses her finger to her lips, mouthing, “Shhh!”

“Where did you get a gun?” I hiss.

“Oliver lent it to me. He was always looking out for me. Told me to shoot first and run. He said the asking-questions-later part was for the police.” She grins at my expression. “Does that earn me cool points?”

I swirl a fry in the mound of ketchup on my plate. “You want cool points for pulling a gun on my father?” I say it with all the appropriate disdain and condescension it deserves, but deep down, we both know she gets mega cool points for it.

“Psh.” She waves her hand. “I didn’t even know whether or not it would fire. And anyway, he didn’t hand me his wallet. He propositioned me instead.”

“Okay. Ew.”