I have my license, but the angles are wrong from the passenger seat. The wheel wobbles in my hand while my mother pinches the papered bone of chemicals and dried leaves between her lips and lights it. A wisp of smoke uncurls from its tip. I hold my breath, but the smoke finds me anyway. I cough and pull my sweatshirt over my nose when she reclaims the wheel.
“You really hate me, don’t you?”
“I don’t hate you,” I say through the cotton tent. I try not to make it obvious how cold I am.
“I’m a terrible mother.”
“You’re not a terrible mother.”
My mother’s face twists with pain, as though I’ve said the opposite. She flicks her ashes out the window, but the breeze redirects them into the backseat, where I will later vacuum them out of the creases in the upholstery.
As we cross the bridge, air whistles through the gaps between the concrete pilings. I stare out over the sound, the three miles of shallow, brackish chop that separate us from the North American continent. “You did the best you could,” I tell her, as if being a mother is something she did a long time ago, something that can’t be changed.
*
In June, I graduate as one of four valedictorians. After the ceremony, Mr. Meeks gives me an A-frame hug in the parking lot. He’s boyish in his college robes, his neat goatee a blatant bid to look older. “How’s Absalom coming?” he asks.
“Slowly,” I confess. I’m bogged down in pages of italics.
“There’s something you’ll have to look for when you get to Cambridge,” Mr. Meeks says. “Some Faulkner fans put a plaque commemorating Quentin’s suicide on a bridge over the Charles. They even engraved the date from his section of The Sound and the Fury. I don’t remember where I heard about it.”
“A real plaque for a fictional suicide?”
He nods. Neither of us has mentioned John Everett, but I wonder if the rumor is true, that there was some clue in his English journals that Meeks didn’t read until after the shooting. Meeks appears placid and inscrutable.
“That’s weird but kind of cool,” I add to fill the silence.
“You’ll have to send me a picture if you find it.”
“I will,” I say, and mean it.
*
I spend that summer finishing Absalom and helping my mother clean beach rentals. She scours the bathrooms and kitchens, while I dust and vacuum the bedrooms and common areas. The rentals tend to be sandier and messier than private residences, but the filth is never more than a week old, and we never have to see the people who produced it. My mother likes to work in her bare feet, which bothers me. She says it’s how she knows when the floors are clean.
Come August, she takes me to the liquor store for free boxes and to Wal-Mart to buy a box fan and detergent and a laundry bag for my dorm room. The night before the long drive north to Cambridge, while my mother smokes her last cigarette on the back deck before bed, I locate her pistol beneath a stack of puzzle books in her nightstand drawer. She insists she only keeps it for shooting the cottonmouths who like to mate in the azaleas by the house in May and September. Unlike most snakes, a cottonmouth tends not to flee if disturbed. Imagine a snake thick as a grown man’s arm and black as swamp water, pale mouth sprung like a hinge, hissing as it lunges toward you. According to my mother, you can’t just shoot it in the head and expect it to die. You have to shoot it down the open throat.