Sweetie's Diamonds by Raymond Benson

mom?” David asked after chewing a piece of rubbery fried shrimp from the microwaved frozen dinner.   They often lived off of TV dinners and take-out during the school week.  
    She looked up and smiled.   “Hmm?   Sure.   Why do you ask?”
    â€œYou’re miles away.”
    She nodded.   “I suppose I am.   I’m sorry.   I have a lot on my mind.   School and stuff.”
    â€œWhat stuff?”
    â€œOh, just finances and things.   Never mind.   Nothing for you to worry about.”
    David tilted his head slightly and squinted at her sideways, the way she sometimes eyed him when she didn’t believe something he had said.    
    Diane laughed.   “No, really.   I was just in my own little world.   Tell me about your day.”  
    They spent the rest of the dinner talking as if nothing were the matter.  
    But David knew better.

DAVID’S JOURNAL
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    T onight while Mom was doing something else, I got on our computer to see if I could find out anything about what she used to do.   The computer is in the living room so both of us can use it.   We finally got cable today so both the TV and the computer are hooked up.  
    I’m not supposed to look at porn sites but we don’t have any kind of parental control on the computer.   As long as Mom doesn’t see, I guess I’m okay.   Anyway, I used Yahoo to search for “porn stars” and “pornstars” and came up with about a zillion websites.   I didn’t know where to start.   I started clicking through the search results until I came across one that appeared to be something more than just pictures.   The site was called “Porn Star Legends” and it had a big database full of porn stars’ biographies since the 1970s.   The problem was that I wasn’t sure what name my Mom went under.   I couldn’t remember all the names of the ladies who were in the video that Billy and I saw, but I remembered a couple.   One was Karen Klinger and the other was Lucy Luv.   I looked up Karen Klinger first.   There was a picture of her face and some bio information and I could see immediately that it wasn’t my Mom.   There were other pictures of Karen too, if you know what I mean!
    Then I looked up Lucy Luv and I hit the jackpot.   There she was.   My Mom, in all her GLORY.   It sure is weird for me, her SON, to be looking at this stuff.   I mean, I can sort of pretend that the lady on the website isn’t my Mom because she doesn’t really look like her now.   She was so young then.   It’s like she’s a different person, but I know it’s her.  
    While I was looking at the site I heard Mom coming down the hall.   I quickly clicked the mouse to close the window.   The site disappeared and left a website about video games in its place.   I had set that up first so that it’d be on the screen underneath what I was really looking at.
    Mom asked me what I was doing and I told her I was looking for game hints.   She went on about her business and I brought the porn site back up.  
    It said that Lucy Luv’s real name was Dana Barnett.   But that’s not my Mom’s name.   My Mom’s name is Diane and her maiden name was Wilson.   Did she use a different “real” name as well as her “porn star” name?   I don’t know much about these things but it seems weird.  
    The website listed several movies she was in, produced by some company called Erotica Selecta Films.   I recognized Blondes Have a Helluva Lot More Fun on the list of about eight titles.    
    Lucy Luv arrived on the porn scene in Los Angeles in 1977, made a few movies, and then disappeared in 1980.   It said that there was talk in the industry that she had been murdered at the same time as another porn star named Angel Babe.   No one knows