The Whore's Child

calculations. Finally, she wadded these up and tossed them in the wastebasket. “What’s all this going to cost?” she wondered, her eyes brimming.
    By the time we went to dinner, her spirits were, if anything even lower. She’d showered and put on a normal-length skirt and neither eye makeup nor lipstick. The dining room was full of Baptists and every time we heard the word “Missouri,” it was pronounced exactly as the manager had said it.
    My mother sighed and contemplated her menu as if it were printed in a foreign language. “We’ve died and gone to hell, sweetie,” she said in the voice she used for not-strictly-private observations.
    That night, once I was acting like I’d fallen asleep, my mother slipped out. She was gone only a few minutes, just long enough, it later occurred to me, to make a phone call.
    Unfortunately, the next couple days provided considerable evidence to support my mother’s theory that we’d died and gone to hell. As we came down out of the green hills of eastern Oklahoma, what shimmered below was a truly hellish landscape—flat and dry and empty, as large as the ocean off the Maine coast, but brown. Suddenly the temperature was in the nineties, and our rain-soaked upholstery smelled musty. We didn’t have air-conditioning, so we rolled down the windows and let the desert air thunder in around us like so many angry demons. The noise made impossible the conversation we’d lacked the heart for since Joplin, and the turbulence turned my mother’s hair into a rat’s nest of tangles. She didn’t try to make out like it was the wind of freedom, either. She still wasn’t wearing makeup.
    As far as my mother was concerned, Oklahoma had even less to recommend it than Missouri. In fact, its single virtue seemed to be that its inhabitants didn’t offer an unusual pronunciation. I tried my best to raise my mother’s spirits, but she stared straight ahead at the empty landscape with palpable loathing. What had happened in Missouri seemed to have made her a fatalist, and now she seemed incapable of even fear, her most dependable highway emotion. Since Maine every time we were passed on the highway by a semi and felt the sensation of being vacuumed beneath its huge wheels, she tensed, bracing for the imagined impact. No more. She seemed not even to notice the big trucks as they roared past, blaring air horns at us, some of them. Her lack of concern was spooky, because I couldn’t tell whether the miles had taught her that there was less danger than she feared, or whether the vandals of Joplin had demonstrated how vulnerable we were, despite all her care and planning.
    We made fewer stops now because there was next to nothing, according to my mother, worth stopping for, though she did take grim satisfaction from paying a dollar to a toothless old man in Texas for the privilege of peering down a shallow, bowl-shaped well at a dense knot of lethargic, dusty rattlesnakes. However dispiriting, though, the snakes weren’t our biggest problem as we blew like a hot wind through the panhandle. The glass was, and had been for days. Naturally, we’d done the best we could with the tiny slivers of broken glass that had rained throughout the car’s interior. The company that replaced the windshield had vacuumed—once to their own satisfaction, and then again to my mother’s—but the glass had worked itself deep into the seams and creases of the cloth seats, until we coaxed them out with our tender flesh. The microscopic shards insinuated their way into our haunches and thighs and behind our knees, registering first as mild discomfort, a squirming and scratching inability to get settled. Only later, starting the first night out of Joplin, did we realize what was happening. My mother was in the shower, and I heard her yelp as the hot, soapy water bit like gasoline into the scores of tiny cuts. Between us, we went through a whole box of Band-Aids that night.
    â€œI don’t know what to say, sweetie,” my mother admitted when she finally switched off the lamps. “We’re losing blood.”
    â€œActually, it’s a lot like being married,” she explained days later as we neared the New Mexico state line, referring to the multitude of nicks that still had us squirming in the front seat of the Ford. “You don’t quite know whether to shit or go blind.”
    The vulgarity made me