lived on a reservation. In a vague way, I hoped something was going to happen.
I was the sort of kid who spent a Sunday afternoon prying little trees out of the foundation of his parents’ house. I should have given in to the inevitable truth that this was the sort of person I would become, in the end, but I kept fighting it. Yet when I say that I wanted there to be something, I mean nothing bad, but something. A rare occurrence. A sighting. A bingo win, though Sunday was not a bingo day and it would have been completely out of character for my mother to play. That’s what I wanted, though, something out of the ordinary. Only that.
Halfway to Hoopdance, it occurred to me that the grocery store was closed on Sunday.
Of course it is! My father’s chin jutted, his hands tightened on the wheel. He had a profile that would look Indian on a movie poster, Roman on a coin. There was a classic stoicism in his heavy beak and jaw. He kept driving because, he said, she might have forgotten it was Sunday, too. Which was when we passed her. There! She whizzed by us in the other lane, riveted, driving over the speed limit, anxious to get back home to us. But here we were! We laughed at her set face as we did a U-turn there on the highway and followed her, eating her dust.
She’s mad, my father laughed, so relieved. See, I told you. She forgot. Went to the grocery and forgot it was closed. Mad now she wasted gas. Oh, Geraldine!
There was amusement, adoration, amazement in his voice when he said those words. Oh, Geraldine! Just from those two words, it was clear that he was and had always been in love with my mother. He had never stopped being grateful that she had married him and right afterward given him a son, when he’d come to believe he was the end of the line.
Oh, Geraldine.
He shook his head, smiling as we drove along, and everything was all right, more than all right. We could now admit we had been worried by my mother’s uncharacteristic absence. We could be jolted into a fresh awareness of how we valued the sanctity of small routine. Wild though I saw myself in the mirror, in my thoughts, I valued such ordinary pleasures.
So it was our turn, then, to worry her. Just a little, said my father, just to let her in for a taste of her own medicine. We took our time bringing the car back to Clemence’s house and walked up the hill, anticipating my mother’s indignant question, Where were you? I could just see her hands knuckled on her hips. Her smile twitching to jump from behind her frown. She’d laugh when she heard the story.
We walked up the dirt driveway. Alongside it in a strict row, Mom had planted the pansy seedlings she’d grown in paper milk cartons. She’d put them out early. The only flower that could stand a frost. As we came up the drive we saw that she was still in the car. Sitting in the driver’s seat before the blank wall of the garage door. My father started running. I could see it too in the set of her body—something fixed, rigid, wrong. When he got to the car, he opened the driver’s side door. Her hands were clenched on the wheel and she was staring blindly ahead, as she had been when we passed her going the opposite way on the road to Hoopdance. We’d seen her intent stare and we’d laughed then. She’s mad at the wasted gas!
I was just behind my father. Careful even then to step over the scalloped pansy leaves and buds. He put his hands on hers and carefully pried her fingers off the steering wheel. Cradling her elbows, he lifted her from the car and supported her as she shifted toward him, still bent in the shape of the car seat. She slumped against him, stared past me. There was vomit down the front of her dress and, soaking her skirt and soaking the gray cloth of the car seat, her dark blood.
Go down to Clemence, said my father. Go down there and say I am taking your mother straight to the Hoopdance Emergency. Tell them to follow.
With one hand, he opened the door to the backseat and then, as though they were dancing in some awful way, he maneuvered