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be reminded of how the "something big" had backfired.
    The Encounter Inside the House
    OUR KITCHEN TABLE WAS ROUND and made of oak. One afternoon when we were in grade school, my sister and I carved our names in it with steak knives. We hadn't finished when we heard the door open–our mother was home from work–so we threw the steak knives back in the drawer. My sister grabbed the biggest thing she could find, a half gallon of apple juice, and plopped it down. When my mother entered, wearing her nurse's outfit, her arms full of magazines, we must have said, "Hi, Mom" too quickly, because she immediately became suspicious. You can see that in your mother's face right away, that "What did you kids do?" look. Maybe because we were sitting at an otherwise empty table at 5:30 in the afternoon with a half gallon of apple juice between us.
    Anyhow, without letting go of her magazines, she nudged the juice aside and saw CHAR and ROBER–which was as far as we got–and she let out a loud, exasperated sound, something like "uhhhhch. " Then she screamed,
    "Great, just great! " and in my childish mind I thought maybe it wasn't so bad. Great was great, right?
    My father was traveling in those days, and my mother threatened his wrath when he got home. But that night as we sat at the table eating a meat loaf with a hardboiled egg inside it–a recipe she had read somewhere, perhaps in one of those magazines she carried–my sister and I kept glancing at our work.
    "You know you've completely ruined this table," my mother said.
    "Sorry," we mumbled.
    "And you could have cut your fingers off with those knives."
    We sat there, admonished, lowering our heads to the obligatory level for penance. But we were both thinking the same thing. Only my sister said it. "Should we finish, so at least we spell our names right?"
    I stopped breathing for a moment, astonished at her courage. My mother shot her a dagger-like stare. Then she burst out laughing. And my sister burst out laughing. And I spit out a mouthful of meatloaf.
    We never finished the names. They remained there always as CHAR
    and ROBER. My father, of course, blew a gasket when he got home.
    But I think over
    the years, long after we'd departed Pepperville Beach, my mother came to like the idea that we had left something behind, even if we were a few letters short.
    NOW I SAT at that old kitchen table and I saw those markings, and then my mother–or her ghost, or whatever she was–came in from the other room with an antiseptic bottle and a washcloth. I watched her pour the antiseptic into the fabric, then reach for my arm and push up my shirtsleeve, as if I were a little boy who had fallen off the swing set. Perhaps you're thinking: Why not scream out the absurdity of the situation, the obvious facts that made this all impossible, the first of which is, "Mother, you died"?
    I can only answer by saying it makes sense to me now as it makes sense to you now, in the retelling, but not in that moment. In that moment, I was so stunned by seeing my mother again that correcting it seemed impossible. It was dream-like, and maybe part of me felt I was dreaming, I don't know. If you've lost your mother, can you imagine seeing her right in front of you again, close enough to touch, to smell? I knew we had buried her. I remembered the funeral. I remembered shoveling a symbolic pile of dirt on her coffin.
    But when she sat down across from me and dabbed the washcloth on my face and arms, and she grimaced at the cuts and mumbled, "Look at you"–I don't know how to say it. It burst through my defenses. It had been a long time since anyone wanted to be that close to me, to show the tenderness it took to roll up a shirtsleeve. She cared. She gave a crap. When I lacked even the self-respect to keep myself alive, she dabbed my cuts and I fell back into being a son; I fell as easily as you fall into your pillow at night. And I didn't want it to end. That's the best way I can explain it. I knew it was