“Your mother is stable,” he
said. “She’s out of surgery.”
“Is she going to be okay?”
He thought for a moment
about what he was going to say.
“I don’t like to use this word,”
he said, “because I’m a man of
science and I don’t believe in it. But
what happened to your mother
today was a miracle. I never say
that, because I hate it when people
say it, but I don’t have any other
way to explain this.”
The bullet that hit my mother
in the butt, he said, was a through-
and-through. It went in, came out,
and didn’t do any real damage. The