My mother stands in the middle of the street. Her hair is blowing around her shoulders, across her face, twisting at her throat.
I am sitting on the curb. There is grass in my mouth, but I have forgotten it. I am no longer crying. I am watching her whipping hair, eyes wild and wide and the Carlson brothers in front of her, no older than ten, straddling their bikes.
She is screaming, “Look at me. Look at me, goddamn it.”
She is moving toward them. There is a car behind her now.
Chrome bumper.
“Look at me, goddamn it, you little shits.”
She is leaning forward.
“If you ever,” she says, “touch him again. Touch him again.”
She is bent at the waist, her hands on their handlebars—a red fist on each—the wind is blowing harder. It is fall. Her black hair is snapping at their pink cheeks.
“So help me God. You touch him again. You touch him again. You touch him again.”
Her eyes are unlike anything they’ve ever been. The driver blows his horn. Her hands come away from the bikes. She faces the car. The Carlson boys are pedaling hard now. They are gone and she is still standing in the street. The wind is at her back. Her hair is blowing toward the car. She does not speak. Only stares at the windshield, at whatever she can see through the shining leaves, the silver sky.
“Mom,” I say, “Mom.”
She turns and walks to me. The man rolls down his window.
“Crazy bitch,” he says as he drives past. “Crazy fucking bitch,” but it’s as if she doesn’t hear him, doesn’t even flinch, and I know she is the stronger one.
She comes and lifts me from the curb and into her arms, even if I’m too old for it, too heavy for her. I don’t want to be held. She draws her head back to get a better look at me. We’re walking towards the house. I can see Claire so small on the front step watching as we pass.
“Joey,” she says, and pinches a blade of grass from my lip. “Joey,” she whispers as she carries me to the house. “Those little shits,” she whispers, “those little assholes.”
“Good for her,” Tess says. “No one fucks with Joey.”
I stand in the shower after she calls the motel and this is the memory that comes. My mother and her wild hair and those terrified brothers and the man leaning across the passenger seat to call her a crazy bitch.
It is the last in what I have come to believe was a series of premonitions. A series that began with the bird in February, and on to the restaurant in Los Angeles and all the others. Instantaneous recollections, momentary hallucinations, or that other thing: pure detached sensation. On the beach, or in the bar basement changing a keg, or on the highway, or in the shower. A radiating feeling of familiarity, a kind of haunting, which carried with it neither sound nor image. Only a vague vibrating. A chill. Cold mist along my spine. Something like what some music does to me. Something like that.
Or perhaps these premonitions were all imagined. My imagined imaginings. A warping of two levels of experience. My faithless memory of memory. As sharp and shining as the edges of this table.
My mother sings me to sleep in her softest voice, “If wishes were horses, Joey, beggars would ride. If turnips were watches, my sweet boy, I’d wear one by my side.”