"Shouldn't have," she said. "It was hot and I was tired, but still . . . shouldn't have. Wanted to tell you I was sorry."
My eyes started leaking again. "It's all right, ma.
That was a long time ago."
"You never got your ride," she whispered.
"I did, though," I said. "In the end I did." She smiled up at me. She looked small and weak, miles from the angry, sweaty, muscular woman who had yelled at me when we finally got to the head of the line, yelled and then whacked me across the nape of the neck. She must have seen something on some-one's face-one of the other people waiting to ride the Bullet-because I remember her saying What are you looking at, beautiful? as she lead me away by the hand, me snivelling under the hot summer sun, rub-bing the back of my neck . . . only it didn't really hurt, she hadn't swatted me that hard; mostly what I remember was being grateful to get away from that high, twirling construction with the capsules at either end, that revolving scream machine.
"Mr. Parker, it really is time to go," the nurse said.
I raised my mother's hand and kissed the knuckles.
"I'll see you tomorrow," I said. "I love you, ma." "Love you, too. Alan . . . sorry for all the times I swatted you. That was no way to be."
But it had been; it had been her way to be. I didn't know how to tell her I knew that, accepted it. It was part of our family secret, something whispered along the nerve endings.
"I'll see you tomorrow, ma. Okay?"
She didn't answer. Her eyes had rolled shut again, and this time the lids didn't come back up. Her chest rose and fell slowly and regularly. I backed
away from the bed, never taking my eyes off her.
In the hall I said to the nurse, "Is she going to be all right? Really all right?"
"No one can say that for sure, Mr. Parker. She's Dr. Nunnally's patient. He's very good. He'll be on the floor tomorrow afternoon and you can ask him-" "Tell me what you think."
"I think she's going to be fine," the nurse said, lead-ing me back down the hall toward the elevator lobby. "Her vital signs are strong, and all the residual effects suggest a very light stroke." She frowned a little. "She's going to have to make some changes, of course.
In her diet . . . her lifestyle . . ."
"Her smoking, you mean."
"Oh yes. That has to go." She said it as if my
mother quitting her lifetime habit would be no more
difficult than moving a vase from a table in the living
room to one in the hall. I pushed the button for the
elevators, and the door of the car I'd ridden up in
opened at once. Things clearly slowed down a lot at CMMC once visiting hours were over.
"Thanks for everything," I said.
"Not at all. I'm sorry I scared you. What I said was incredibly stupid."
"Not at all," I said, although I agreed with her.
"Don't mention it."
I got into the elevator and pushed for the lobby. The nurse raised her hand and twiddled her fingers. I twid-dled my own in return, and then the door slid between us. The car started down. I looked at the fin-gernail marks on the backs of my hands and thought that I was an awful creature, the lowest of the low. Even if it had only been a dream, I was the lowest of the goddam low. Take her, I'd said. She was my mother but I had said it just the same: Take my ma, don't take me. She had raised me, worked overtime for me, waited in line with me under the hot summer sun in a dusty little New Hampshire amusement park, and in the end I had hardly hesitated. Take her, don't take me. Chickenshit, chickenshit, you fucking chickenshit.
When the elevator door opened I stepped out, took the lid off the litter basket, and there it was, lying in someone's almost-empty paper coffee cup: i rode the bullet at thrill village, laconia.
I bent, plucked the button out of the cold puddle of