The second burning woman was small and dark-haired, pert, buxom, younger than my mother but not as pretty. I had never seen her. As had her predecessor a few months earlier, she sat behind the wheel of her car, an orange AMC Matador parked with the engine off at the end of our driveway, windows rolled down. She sat staring with hollow shock at the Boyfriend’s Mustang, which was in turn parked at the head of our driveway, under the basketball hoop mounted on the edge of the carport.

“Hello,” I said, stooping to retrieve the Post.

“Hello,” said the woman.

It was already hot, the sky cloudless, the air dense and starry with gnats, the sun well up over the trees.

“How are you this morning?” I said.

The woman eyed me skeptically as if I were a consolation prize or parting gift sent out by the Boyfriend, who was at that moment sitting at our kitchen table, eating a large bowl of oatmeal that I had made for him—slightly chunky, slightly chewy, and yet smooth and pleasantly glutinous, which I served with sultana raisins, a dissolving puddle of brown sugar, and a nice thick spiral of half-and-half. One of the ongoing puzzles I posed to myself at the age of fifteen was the gap between the things that I knew or felt and the things that I did. Such as, to cite one example, the lengths to which I would go to please the Boyfriend, whom I loathed, and yet whose rough-edged, racy laugh or few words of praise for my cooking could bring tears to my eyes.

“What’s your name?” said the burning woman. She was actually quite pretty, sloe-eyed and freckled with a snub nose and breasts that registered strongly on my tricorder’s bodacity detection array.

“Mike,” I told her.

“Mike.”

“Michael. It means ‘Who is like unto God?’ It’s a question.”

“Do you spell it with a question mark?”

“No, but maybe I should. That could be cool.”

“Do me a favor, Mike?”

“Tell him that you were here?”

She rummaged a package of Eve cigarettes from her purse and pushed in the dashboard lighter. “Done this before,” she said, “I gather.”

“Yes. Not every day, but.”

My mother was one of a number of attractive women in the city of Columbia, Maryland, who were collectively embarked upon the bold enterprise of having their hearts broken by the Boyfriend, whose movements were like those of a guerrilla leader or rebel commander, never sleeping in the same bed longer than two or three nights running. In the interests of security, the Boyfriend apparently thought nothing of dividing one night between two or more beds. The women who loved the Boyfriend tended, like my mother, to be strangely slow on the uptake when it came to grasping the bitter truth about the man, but once they realized that he had been lying to them and running around town with several other women at once, they tended to go through a period—relatively prolonged in my mother’s case—of following him and tracking his movements. Come to think of it, very much like stealthy operatives of a conquering power bent on crushing insurrection. My mother had the Boyfriend that morning, but I knew that only two nights before, she had crept out of the house at two o’clock in the morning to go and stand in the bushes outside the house of another woman in whose driveway the Boyfriend’s Mustang sat, engine clicking.

My mother was, and remains, a cool customer. Not cold, if by cold you mean unfeeling or remote, heartless, or disengaged. But not unduly given, let’s say, to bursting into flame. Big shows of emotion, tears and drama, shouting, proclamations, bold naked statements of love and hate, braggadocio and stomping around—these are not the arts of her hardheaded, soft-spoken race. The woman is considered. Deliberate. Measured. Unflappable. Skeptical and sharp-eyed. Generous with her time and attention, unstinting with sound advice, and steady in her bestowal of moral support, she has never been your Santa Claus of physical affection with the lap and the cookies and the great big sack full of hugs. Hugs when she’s happy, hugs when you’re sad, hello, goodbye, lunch, breakfast, warm soft armloads of love for everyone: not she.

It was quite unexpected, therefore—the right word might be freakish—when my mother, slowly at first, almost imperceptibly, like a leaf that chances to blow into the bright focus of somebody’s spectacles left out in the sun, set herself on fire for the Boyfriend. In the years since my parents’ separation had become final, she’d dated a lot of men, a zoo’s worth, furry and hairless as mole rats, a kitchen drawer’s worth, sharpened and dull. Line them up and they varied in form, tint, and potency like bottles on the back of a bar. Some had been handsome, fit, deep-voiced, and deep-pocketed. Some had come around too much and given her too many rash presents, and others had been aloof and trifled with her time. Some had paid heed to me and my opinions, enough so that I minted fresh opinions for them at twice my usual rate. Others had felt it wisest to proceed to my mother’s bedroom without taking note of the young man on the stairs, in the horned helmet, posing a pertinent question about runes.

In all that time until the Boyfriend, I never saw my mother fall in love, not even a little. And lest this seem a matter of perception or simple wishful thinking on the part of a son perhaps jealous of his mother’s time and affection, looking to do what he could to drive away the likely candidates or downplay the intensity of his mother’s feelings toward them, there was my mother’s own testimony, repeated over the years with suitable variation, in conversation with her girlfriends or to me alone on a drive somewhere far enough that the conversation had time, with my little brother snoring in the backseat, to turn to her love life: He’s nice enough. A little dull. I don’t think this is really heading anywhere. If he calls, tell him I’m not in.

The truth of the matter is that from the moment the very first suitor turned up—call him Roger, call him mustached and tweedy and festooned with an Isro—and I realized that such a thing was possible, I had been waiting for my mother to fall in love. It was something I wanted to see, something I knew was fully possible, and not just because I knew that even Vulcans went love-amok once every seven years and that, as our World Book encyclopedia informed me, under the ice of Iceland there burned fires of molten steel. No, I had seen proof of my mother’s ardor in black and white. This photograph—take a look.

My mother and father in the summer of 1962 on a blanket in the sun. A grassy slope, a distant tree. My father, shirtless and smooth, holds my mother in his arms; he’s lying right on top of her. Her head is thrown back to expose to his mouth her throat, and her bare shoulders are in a halter top. Her hand, fingers splayed, is pressed against the flesh of his back, keeping him, playing him, holding him there. The first time I came upon this picture tucked between the pages of my father’s Modern Library edition of The Poetry of Blake, I was stunned, transfixed by this evidence that in some remote era there must have once existed, as some part of me had always known there must, a kingdom or a civilization or some kind of lost world known, to scholars of dust, as my parents’ love for each other. It was like seeing at long last some kind of theory or explanation of myself, of how I got here, and almost literally so, for printed in the bottom border of the picture were the words AUGUST 1962, and it was not quite ten months later that there came into the world, squalling and shitting, the author of these lines. And that was the reason, I think, that I wanted to see my mother in love. Not because armed with this proof of their having once loved each other I hoped that in some whistle-while-you-wish Wonderful World of Disney way it would be my father toward whom she once again would kindle her heart, but because something made sense to me, looking at the picture, that had never made sense before. In the absence of the kind of passion, of fire, to which the photograph attested, what was the point of it all? Why else had they done it—built it all up so they could then knock it all down? After a marriage breaks, there is nothing more pointless than the child, to that child, of that marriage.

The lighter popped out, and the second burning woman looked into its radiant coils for a moment, then reached in and poked them with the tip of her finger. I could hear the hiss of her flesh as it singed. Actually, it was not that long since I had conducted the very same experiment with the lighter in our Impala, perhaps out of the same aimless and darkly curious urge. Would I be like her one day? Come to the same dire pass, driving around all night in the pursuit, at once brazen and furtive, of the thing that was hurting me the most? Fervently, I hoped and dreaded that it would be so.

“Ah!” she said. “Ouch.” She held her cigarette to the heat, inhaling a savage puff to get it going, then shook out her fingers as if drying polish on her nails. Then she told me her name, which I no longer remember. “You can tell him I was here, Mike. All right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Miss.”

“Yes, miss.”

“And tell him I had fun last night chasing him all around town.”

“Did you have fun?”

“Not a minute,” said the burning woman, and then she drove off into the flames.