Where had I gone wrong? In four years as a mother, I thought I’d done a good job. So where had I failed? I pictured myself twenty years hence, cornered by a crime reporter. “I tried my best,” I’d sob. “But he began dealing in stolen property at four, and it was downhill from there . . .”
An explosion of splinters stabs up his spine. Carrick’s eyes shutter open. Where the fuck am I? . . .
Walking through the weeds of a highway shoulder at night. That was okay. She’d check on Valerie and finish off the bit on Joey’s mirror. Whenever cars passed she turned and stuck out her thumb like she was in a movie. She felt ridiculous, but a car pulled over. Milk ran up to it, got in, and came to in the morning in the weeds of another shoulder . . .
The nurse pulled onto the outer road parallel to the interstate. The blue friendliness of the St. Luke’s sign radiated faintly in the dawn light as he accelerated before the red admonition of the emergency sign took over his view. He clicked off the malfunctioning turn signal. The morning traffic was light, almost nonexistent. He waited until he had reached forty-five miles an hour to remove his skull-and-bones do-rag, the first phase of his elaborate post-work ritual . . .
A typical Thursday. A typical night.
Jerry stretched his feet under the dining table, yawning. His eleventh grade math homework seemed to glare at him from the fluorescent white of the overhead light. They were covering probability in class, something Jerry knew plenty about.
There was a thump above him.
Typical Thursday night . . .
Back in 1949, I lived with my grandparents out in the country on a small farm near Richmond, Virginia. Something serious was going on one day as I entered the kitchen at five thirty in the morning. Grandpa and Grandma were standing at the sink, staring so intently out the kitchen window they didn’t even hear me come in . . .
He spotted the guy with the poodle a block and a half away, as he did every morning . . .
“You need to build your confidence,” he says. “You need to build your self-esteem. You need to build a @better-you. For a @better-us #selfie-rule . . .”