bed most nights.
There was no stepfather in the
picture yet, no baby brother crying
in the night. It was me and her,
alone. There was this sense of the
two of us embarking on a grand
adventure. She’d say things to me
like, “It’s you and me against the
world.” I understood even from an
early age that we weren’t just
mother and son. We were a team.
It was when we moved to Eden
Park that we finally got a car, the
beat-up, tangerine Volkswagen my
mother bought secondhand for next
to nothing. One out of five times it
wouldn’t start. There was no AC.