which chugged reluctantly to life, an uneven, ragged sound made by rusted parts for which money was too scarce to have Richie — the mechanic Mommy knew well from repeated trips to Have The Car Looked At — take care of. He had become a regular fixture in their family’s life, like a doctor of a patient who is slowly dying, proffering sympathetic looks and palliative care.  And the car itself, with its dull, faded, rancid-cream paint, covered with huge tumor-like blotches of Bondo (“You need that fixed?  $25, I have it done for youse in a week,” the guy in the equally battered van had said to his mother at a stoplight), and fraying vinyl top, bore an uncanny similarity to a lesion-bespotted patient.

It had been several minutes, and Mommy had still said nothing.  He fidgeted in his seat, and played with the duct-taped window crank in silence.  He wanted to leave, and wondered for a childlike instant what would happen if he pulled on the door handle and got out, and ran; ran away from that house, ran from the leprous car filled with fetid, tension-infused air, ran around the corner, Across the Street, where had had been strictly forbidden To Go Without a Parent; ran to whatever was beyond that.  It scared him, this desire to run; unlike Hiding Away, it would be impossible to disguise.

Mommy broke her reverie.  Her affect changed as if by a switch; she shook her head slightly, as if to wake herself up, and tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear.  She glanced, sidelong, in his direction, as if about to speak, but said nothing.  She shifted the car into “D” (which he proudly recognized as “Drive”), and looked over her left shoulder before pulling out into the quiet street.

He was glad that it was, in fact, quiet — that the neighbor whose daughter invited him to birthday parties wasn’t there, that the man down the street who sometimes let him watch while he worked on a rusted ’57 Chrysler in his garage wasn’t there, that the fat orange cat who wandered onto their lawn every day, meowing to be petted and, sometimes, to be given tunafish that he had stolen from the kitchen, wasn’t there.  Aside from the cat, he had seen neither of them, or anyone else who lived nearby, since months before The Move.  He didn’t understand why, or understand that, when the miasma of divorce hung over a home, Grown-Ups often retreated into their own homes and worlds, as if not wanting to catch a contagious disease.  Or that watching and hearing screaming arguments, occasionally on the front lawn, other times, clearly audible through open (or at times, closed) windows, tended to make .  He understood none of what Mommy probably did, none of the Adult Things that she thought or assumed were beyond his awareness; in this moment, he understood only that he was glad that his friend, and his neighbor, and a furry creature who asked little and gave the comfort of deep, loud, rumbling purrs when he pressed his ear to his side, weren’t around to say goodbye, because he would have cried.

They drove for several minutes in silence.

“I’m…sorry.”

He looked over at Mommy.

“Sorry for what I said.  I never should have talked that way to you.”  She looked briefly over at him.  “This has been bad for me, and bad for you.  Just…bad.”

“I love you, Mommy.”

She smiled and looked as if she would cry again.  “I love you too.  Very much.”  She rounded  a corner, honking briefly at a car that seemed to veer toward them.  IDIOT, she hissed under her breath.  “I don’t know what to give you, right now.  I don’t know what to give me right now.”

He looked at her, puzzled.