Our mom had this thing where the air had to be blowing on her or she’d get carsick. Rolling down the window was no good; it needed to be the steady air of the AC fluttering her bangs or she’d want to puke everywhere. Dad didn’t love it. He said it froze his hands and my mom always said, well, turn it away from your hands, and he responded that the vents were where they needed to be but that there was no need for the air. If they were out driving and they stopped someplace like the drugstore for mom to run in, Dad would turn off the air thinking she wouldn’t notice but you could tell even from the back seat that it wasn’t good. First she’d turn kind of an ashy color and if the air didn’t come back on, she started looking almost marbled, and then she asked our dad to pull over so she could open the door and sit with her feet in the gutter between the pavement and the curb.

 

     That year when our mom asked our dad what he wanted for Christmas, he told her he wanted gloves, and she asked him if he meant like leather driving gloves. But he said no, he wanted glove gloves, knitted or poplin or whatever they stuff inside gloves to keep your fingers warm, so that’s what she got him, and he wore them when we drove anywhere, in all seasons.

 

     They were kind of funny gloves for a grown man to wear, knit from rainbow thread so that they had rings of color up and down the fingers and across his hand, all the way to the wrist, all the colors of the rainbow like a roll of lifesavers. But he wore them, he didn’t care who saw them. He asked her, Are people supposed to think I’m something I’m not, because of some gloves? I don’t think so.

 

     We knew what he meant when he said something like that, even though we only sat in the back seat. It meant he belonged to our mom, and if she gave him the gloves, that meant that they were all right for him to wear.

 

     He had big hands, thick and muscled around the knuckles, like the roots of trees, and he’d play a game that scared us of spider-walking his hands across the kitchen table toward us till they leapt from the tabletop to land on the crown of our heads and, he said, suck out our brains. The pads of his fingers would press light pulses against our scalps. That’s how I learned my times table, one increase for each squeeze of my father’s hands, eight sixteen twenty-four thirty-two forty.

 

     Our mother would drive us to school in the morning, and she’d sit in the driver's seat with the engine running for five minutes before we got underway. She told us to find our inner learner, to call him or her out of the cave of home life and bring them forward while she fussed with the vents and got the air just the way she needed it. Then we were off to school where I was making a name for myself in math class for the pulsing certainty of the way I recited my times tables, not fast or slow, just as regular as the numbers themselves and without error.

 

     I was a good student, I guess, but I’d never warranted or received any special attention for it. I turned in my work when it was asked for and when I got it back, I usually got an A or a 100% but it’s not like the paper came back with stickers or anything like that. I was in a group that was understood to be the smart kids, but it wasn’t something people remarked on, one way or the other. If anything, I envied my sister Eliza because she could run from the stop sign on the corner to the bus stop faster than anyone else.

 

     That’s what made it weird when Mrs. Widener told me at the end of school that I should go to the Principal’s office instead of the bus pick-up spot, that my mother was waiting for me there. I was a little scared, because of course I was, but I couldn’t remember having done anything especially wrong, so I just figured it was something I’d understand when I got there. When I walked into the office, the Principal’s door was open and I could hear my mother’s voice even if I couldn’t see her, and she was calling the principal by his first name, Leland. The aide, Ms. Hooker, asked me to join them so I pushed back the swinging half door and walked into the Principal’s office. He was turned half-toward me in his chair, showing my mother his doughy profile, and she had her handbag at her feet where she was sitting. They looked up at my entrance, and then my mother directed me to sit down and explained that she and Leland were talking about my education.

 

     I sat. My mother was perfectly capable of saying “my lack of progress” or my “insufficient progress” if she wanted to, and she hadn’t, so I thought it might be a good thing.

 

     I’ve heard from Mrs. Widener and some of your other teachers, Principal Varin explained, that you might benefit from a more challenging curriculum. Your mother and I were having a conversation about just that very thing.

 

     There’s a program, my mother said, and then stopped herself to start again, proper. On Saturday mornings, you know your brother has hockey practice. Of course I did. We thought you might enjoy something similar, only focused on Language Arts and Social Studies. I didn’t anticipate that I’d enjoy it, exactly, but I took her meaning. That it would be good for me, that it would sharpen me somehow for the world and make me better able to what came next, when I moved up to the middle school or wherever. So it was agreed, and that next Saturday, when we used to drive as a family in my father’s car to drop my brother off at hockey practice and then Eliza and I would chase each other around Elm Park, my mother took her car and drove me to a series of buildings that she explained were where she went to college.

 

     I hadn’t ever thought about my mother going to college. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised—she was obviously very smart and well-educated, which she’d helped us to understand were two different things—but it took me a minute to readjust my expectations.

 

     The class itself was a different sort of experience, one that seemed set off from the rest of my life by how strange it made me feel. We read poems by this man named Hafiz. Guzzles, they were called, and I felt my tongue get thicker when I read them, and then, later, when we’d try to write our own, it was like my breath was a breeze, which was something I had no concept of how to talk about with anyone else. Sometimes I’d be back in my regular weekday school and I’d forget myself and say something about the world spirit and even I didn’t know what I meant.

 

     But what was most striking to me was what it was like being in the car alone with my mother. I already knew she was particular—her word, my father always joking that the word she meant was peculiar—about what happened in the car, with the vents and all that. But being in that space with her alone made it different. For example, the radio. When we drove anywhere as a family, I expected either the familiar melodies of Motown or soft-rock, without feeling any kind of way about either in terms of my personal preference. It was audio wallpaper, and just as notable. But in addition to checking the vents to see they were where she wanted and first the rear view and then the side mirrors, she’d hitch the seat forward and back a few times and let the steering wheel drop so that it almost faced the floor before she reset it. Then, she tuned the radio to a station that played classical music. It was something I didn’t hear elsewhere, not even in elevators to my dentist. And she listened with great enthusiasm, waving her hands in the air more like she was clearing away smoke than conducting an orchestra. And when the composition resolved itself or else moved onto a new movement, she’d nod vigorously along with it, as if to say, well done, before moving onto the next thing.

 

     And that’s not mentioning the small cardboard tree she leaned across me to pull out of the glove box that she’d hang from the rearview mirror. It had a circle with a slash printed across it. Smell that, she directed me after the first time she hung it with me in the car.

 

     I sniffed. I couldn’t smell anything.

 

     Exactly, she explained. It was a neutralizer and pulled smells out of the air instead of fouling it with some synthetic perfume. And then she dug in her purse, big enough that it took up most of the passenger seat, and took out a blue hard candy wrapped in crinkly plastic and put it in her mouth. A minute later, the car filled with a medicinal smell more powerful than the doctor’s office before I got a shot. I thought the neutralizer was broken, but it was hard to care, with my mother conducting and clicking her teeth on her candy, air conditioning lifting her bangs lightly like we were driving at a moderate pace into a stiff wind.

 

     One Saturday, the kind of thing forecast by potholed roads and the slow climb of the odometer and the scheduled wear of whitewall tires, my dad’s car was in shop. Maybe it was something with the shocks, which he was always complaining about as he sped up to catch some air off the speed bump near the end of our street. Or maybe it was something more routine, an oil change or inspection. But somehow the usual way we did things, two cars with my dad taking my brother to hockey practice and then doing who knows what with my sister during that time and my mother taking me to my lesson, and until that moment I never wondered what my mother did while I was there. Probably, she read a drugstore novel but maybe she solved complicated mathematical equations or else wrote her memoirs. I began to wonder and then was knocked off my speculation by what I saw happening in the front seat.

 

     My mother was behind the wheel because this was, after all, her car, primarily, and my dad was sitting in the passenger seat. My mom’s purse was on the floor in the back, where we were. My dad was wearing his rainbow gloves, which were looking a little worse for wear, a fat thread pulled loose on the ring finger and standing out like an antenna for transmissions from an alien world. My mom started the car and adjusted the vents while we waited, and then we pulled out onto the street. She pushed in the power button on the radio where she always did, just before we got the speed bump, and then my brother distracted us by twirling his hockey stick around in the backseat and catching my sister in the nose.

 

     Hey, Eliza said. That hurt.

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     Don’t be a baby, he said, which was what he said to both of us a hundred times a day at that point.

 

     I waited, not for what Eliza would say back, but for what radio station my mother’s fingers would find on the dial. And then it came back from the front seat to the back, the opening measures of “Isn’t She Lovely” and my dad slid his gloved hand, with its loose thread, against the bench seat and pressed it against my mother’s hip. I sighed. Where my mother and I went on Saturdays, when Eliza and my dad were at Bowen’s hockey practice, was someplace they had never been, never would go. Where parts of us were, right then. Would we ever come back?