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front of the pump. “Did they really?”
    I shrugged. “Not in Driving Inspector Man’s car. Just the cruiser.”
    Mom was laughing so hard she banged her head down on the wheel, which beeped, causing everybody to look at us. Awesome, just what I needed.
    “You need help, ma’am?” a guy at the other pump asked, checking my mother out. It would be awkward if I weren’t completely used to such things.
    She waved her hand dismissively. “No, no, thanks. We’re fine.”
    She flung open her door and grabbed her purse. I sank down in my seat, feeling like the failure I absolutely was at that moment. Her knock on my door startled me.
    “See if you can find any change,” she asked me.
    “What? Where?” I asked.
    “Below the seat,” she said. “Glove compartment?”
    I dug down, trying not to think beyond the project at hand. After excavations with both hands, I came up with a pen, two dollar bills, eighty-seven cents, and a corner of a map showing far northeast Maine. And dirt under my short fingernails. I sorted the money out and handed it to Mom. “I have a ten,” I told her, grabbing for my bag.
    “No, this’ll do us,” she said, and strode across the gas place toward the convenience store/paying place like a lady in a perfume commercial.
    She had never paid cash for gas before, to say nothing about scrounging for change to buy it.
    Scrounging for change in her Porsche.
    She strode back out and pumped the gas expertly into the car. I had never witnessed either of my parents getting less than a full tank of gas before.
    By the time she got back into the driver’s seat, all my annoyance at her for distracting me from my driver’s test with her questions on the way there about whether I had any crushes and how was camp going and was I okay withtaking a breather from piano lessons for the summer—all that had evaporated. Questions tumbled through my mind: What was going to happen to our family? Were we really going to have to move? To where? Could she even get a new mortgage? We weren’t going to be homeless, were we? And if we were, where was she going to park her Porsche? I don’t know if they have secure garages at homeless shelters. Why had she needed to burn her papers? Why had she really gotten fired?
    But I didn’t ask anything.
    I watched her face.
    Her beautiful face, fierce eyes that could turn in a fraction of a second from laughing Caribbean blue to cold hard steel; perfect, pert nose; unlined, unblemished skin…
    For the first time I noticed there were lines on her forehead. Two parallel lines shooting up from the sides of her nose, like railroad tracks splitting her forehead. Her lips were chapped; a fleck of skin tipped off the center of the bottom lip, ready to dive toward her chin but teetering on the edge of her smudged gloss. The semicircles under her eyes were slightly poochy, and shadowy, too.
    My stomach clenched.
    She forced another giggle, but it was not spontaneous anymore. “You have to tell Daddy about that. He will die laughing!”
    That didn’t seem like a consummation devoutly to be wished, at least not in the short run, but I forced a smile,too, and promised to trot out my failure for the amusement (hopefully not terminal) of my father, and then also my sisters. Sure, why not. If I couldn’t bring home the achievement, the certificate, the medal, I may as well perform the story of my failure for them all, I selfishly, self-pityingly thought.
    Mom was right. They all loved the story that night at dinner. Nobody actually died, but all of them, at various points, did gasp for air. Especially Daddy. He was banging the table, cracking up. I admit I embellished the story in a few places, like the Coca-Cola stains on the front of the skinnier cop’s pants. It’s hard to sort out what actually happened, because now I remember it as I told it, and more than that, I remember how delighted they seemed with my story.
    Even in flunking, I could bring joy to my parents.

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