Natalie wanted to hate them: Clark, Jordan, and Jonathan. It would have been easier if they weren't such nice people. They were being friendly enough, but she wasn't ready to befriend them.

She remembered once when she was five, her mom had taken her and her then six-year-old cousin, Susie, for ice cream. The waitress had brought her rocky road in a cone.

"My daughter ordered this in a bowl, not a cone," Mom said.

The waitress got snappy with her. "I remember distinctly that she asked for a sugar cone." Her eyes were on Aunt Lucy's daughter who, with her long straight hair and blue eyes, looked much more like her mother than she did.

"My niece asked for a cone." She pointed to emphasize her point. "My daughter did not."

The white woman had the good grace to blush and mumble an apology. It was only the first in a long string of incidents.

Some people were rude enough when they were out together to ask point-blank if she was her daughter, and there was a look of doubt in their eyes as they did. She didn't get the same scrutiny when she out with her dad.

Black strangers, those who should know what it was to be judged by the color of your skin, would accuse her mom of not knowing how to care for her daughter's hair if she didn't do anything special with her hairstyle. Once, she had a teacher spend her lunch break by taking her hair out of her pigtails and braiding it in a more ethnic way. Mom had been livid that this teacher had presumed to touch her daughter's hair without her permission.

There were those who didn't say a word but just stared back and forth between them, trying to reconcile the image of mother and daughter. The people meant well most of the time. It was just embarrassing to be considered "other". Why couldn't people just see them as they were, a mother with her daughter?

And some of the children were plain mean even in a city that should have celebrated diversity. They would call her names like "fluffy head" in elementary. In middle school, it got worse. She was "chocolate" to the white kids and "albino" to the black kids. Finally, her parents had ended up placing her in a private school to get away from the bullying. No one dared mock her in front of the nuns though a part of her had wondered if they still thought it secretly, which might have been a horrible way to look at it, but could anyone blame her for seeing things that way?

Now in this world, her mom finally had the perfect family. She bet no one had ever asked her if her sons were hers. They could go out as a family, and no one would look at them twice. The boys had it easy. It wasn't their fault, of course. They could no more control the color of their skin than she could control hers. Still, it felt like she had been replaced, and that hurt, whether she wanted it to or not.

"Are you working?" Clark accused Mom's doppelganger, proving he didn't know her at all. Of course, she was working. Some called it drive, others called it being a workaholic, but whatever you labeled it, chasing a story was like breathing or blinking to Mom. She couldn't not do it.

"Just setting up an interview for next week and doing a little research. No big deal."

"Lois," he said, gently but firmly. "We promised each other this wasn't going to be a working vacation."

She wanted to laugh but that would have been poor manners. It was easy for him to leave his work at home. He was a farmer. What was he going to do? Start a garden in the middle of the woods?

She expected her to argue. Instead, she said, "You're right. I'm sorry." She actually put the phone down and then she leaned over and kissed him on the nose.

Chaste for her sake probably, but she still felt like she was going to be physically ill. It would never be anything but unsettling to see her mom with another man even if she was only a version of her mom.

When farmland was finally replaced by trees, she heaved a sigh of relief. Her torture was over or maybe it was just beginning; it was hard to say.

The RV came to a stop at the base of a hill where the dirt road ended.

"Kids, come get your bags," Mom 2.0 said going over to the storage compartment.

Jonathan, or Jon as his brother called him, got in line first. He was handed his bag with a, "What did you pack in here? Rocks?"

"Just the essentials."

She watched her expression change when she saw her in line, gone was the free and easy smile and teasing to be replaced with a tenseness. "Here you go, sweetie."

It was polite, but it cut. It was the tone one reserved for the friends of their children, not for their flesh and blood. It was harder than she had expected, and she wished she hadn't said yes to this trip. Dad had given her the option to back out, but she had been overcome by morbid curiosity at what this other Mom's life was like here. And maybe if she was being completely honest with herself, there was a small part of her that hoped she would suddenly remember her and tell her this was all just a prank or that there was a bond they intrinsically shared that couldn't be broken by time or location.

Her dad caught her eye and shot her a look of sympathy. He was the only one who knew what she was feeling, who could understand that they hadn't just crashed on another Earth but their own private hell that was making their post-apocalyptic world seem like paradise right now. To be with the ones you lost, their faces, their personalities, and even their histories to a point, but for them to know you not at all, to be happy with other people, was like nothing she could have imagined. It was like being in her own special level of Dante's Hell from the classic poem they had studied in English just before the end came. What had been her sin? Taking her life for granted?

She could take nothing for granted now. She couldn't count on there being a sunrise in the morning or even trust that her mother was her mother.