Chapter 51

For the rest of her life my mother believed she’d foreseen Dad’s death.

She said that day when she and Dad were arguing about the pointlessness of life insurance and Dad made his comment “if I’m struck by lightning,” she had felt his death in her chest. She knew right at that moment that he was going to die, and if Dad had just listened to her, if she’d been more insistent, if he’d closed the door on Jiminy Cricket’s oily face, it would never have happened.

She said, “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.”

“You’re not making any sense, Mae,” said Auntie Pat.

Dad had also said, “If I’m hit by a bus,” and he was not hit by a bus. These are just common colloquial phrases to indicate unlikely but possible events.

When I was an angry teenager I once shouted at my mother, “It meant nothing, you knew nothing !”

“I know what I knew! I know what I felt!” My mother banged her chest with her fist. By then my mother had become Madame Mae and foreseeing my father’s death had become her origin story.

I was sixteen at the time, so I thought she was an idiot.