The Whore's Child

stuff’s all hidden away, where only the locals can find it.”
    With each passing day we worried less about being pulled over for driving a stolen car. We were paying for everything in cash, so as not to leave a trail, and my mother chortled each afternoon when we got off the highway. About the only precaution we still took was to park around back of the motel at night, usually in the darkest corner. Which is how—in Joplin, Missouri, at a Holiday Inn supposedly owned by Mickey Mantle— the Ford was a sitting duck for vandals, who took what the police said must’ve been a sledgehammer to the windshield.
    When we came out with our suitcases the next morning, the car was alive with glass. To make matters worse, this was on a Sunday morning, which meant we had to wait an extra day to make repairs. The motel manager pretended as best he could to be solicitous, and he did lend us a small whisk broom to sweep the broken glass off the seats. His mistake was to wonder out loud why we’d parked in the remotest corner of the huge lot. My mother had been looking for somebody to blame, and now she had her man. By the time she finished, she’d questioned his intelligence, his management skill, even his parentage. She’d also expressed her grave reservations about the Holiday Inn chain, the city of Joplin and the rest of Missouri, which she’d never admired in theory and liked still less in reality. Moreover, she doubted Mickey Mantle had ever stepped foot inside the place.
    The manager was a small man, and it was clear he hadn’t much experience in being dressed down by a woman as good-looking and angry and eastern as my mother. And she may well have been the first woman he’d ever seen wearing white lipstick. At any rate, he accepted her criticisms quite calmly, until the Mickey Mantle part. The Mick certainly did own this Holiday Inn, he begged to inform her. He came here all the time, and there were photographs in the lobby to prove it. Furthermore, it wasn’t fair, in his opinion, to judge the whole state of Missouri on the basis of what happened one Saturday night in the furthest reaches of a single parking lot.
    â€œThat’s another thing,” my mother said, when the manager made the mistake of letting his voice drop. “What’s this Missour-uh stuff? That’s an ‘i’ at the end of the word, right?” By now we were back in the lobby, and my mother, spying a motel notepad on the desk, tore off a sheet, circled the word “Missouri” and underlined the end of it three times. How, she wanted to know, could the letter “i” be reasonably pronounced “uh”?
    â€œMadam,” the little man pleaded, “what does this have to do with your automobile?”
    My mother was ready for this. “It just goes to show that people who can’t pronounce the name of the state they live in should never be given a public trust,” she said, and then told him we’d need a room for the night and that she expected it to be free of charge. Informed that a large convention of Baptists had booked the entire inn, and had already begun to arrive, she said, “Well,
un-
book it, Missour-uh, unless you want your snake handlers treated to some words they’ve never heard before, right here in the damn lobby.”
    So we returned to the same room we’d had the night before, where my mother crashed, as she often did after an outburst. “Watch some TV, sweetie,” she told me, and within ten minutes she was fiercely asleep, her face clenched tight, her teeth grinding audibly. She didn’t wake up until afternoon, and even then she was groggy and lethargic. I was sitting at the window, looking out into the parking lot. Our car, minus its windshield, was barely visible through the torrential rain that had been pounding down for half an hour. All the anger that had animated her that morning had now leaked away, replaced by something akin to grief.
    â€œWhy?” she said, looking out the window over my shoulder. Nothing had been stolen from our car, and that’s what was troubling her, that this had been a purely malicious act. “What sort of person would do such a thing?” She seemed to have no idea she was sharing a room with a person who just might be able to explain it to her. After a minute she closed the drapes and turned the TV back on. Then she found some hotel stationery and started doing some