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yourself! Don’t get pulled into Mommy’s atmosphere!”
    He rushed toward them but then began to run around them in a circle. His arms were flat to his sides and he ran with legs slicing like scissors.
    “Don’t worry, Daddy,” he said, “I’m just a moon. I have become a moon.”
    It was one of the best sentences he had ever said. That night, Sunny had written it down in their treatment journal, noting the use of the word “I.” She had not been wearing her wig at the time.
    *   *   *
     
    S UNNY PUT HER HANDS on her face, then slid them up onto her head and pulled off her wig. She laid it in her lap and started picking the dirt out of it, trying to smooth it out. She had another contraction, the fourth one she’d had since the accident, and waited for it to pass. The pain in her back was like someone hacking her apart with an ax.
    “Yes, Bubber knows,” she said.
    “So, it’s kind of like dentures,” said Les Weathers. “You take it off to sleep?”
    “Like dentures,” she said hollowly. “You know what, Les, can you pull over here?”
    She got out of the car. They had been approaching the Granby Street bridge, and she crossed in front of the condos by the shore, walked briskly up the sidewalk over the water. She leaned over the railing, looking down on another creeping branch of another river wandering lazily back through the Norfolk neighborhoods like ivy. She took the wig in her right hand. She looked it over, inside and out, and then hurled it as far as she could into the water. It made a light landing, soaked, and floated. She watched it there for a while and then walked back down the bridge, reloaded herself into Les Weathers’s Lexus, and shut the door again. She had walked forty-six steps out in the open air without her wig in Virginia.
    *   *   *
     
    O NCE, WHEN B UBBER WAS a baby and Maxon was away at a conference, both she and Bubber had the flu at the same time. Nothing she had at home was working to get him to sleep, so she’d run out to get him different medicine and she had not worn her wig. She was just too sick and tired to bother with it. Throwing on a sweatshirt with a hood and sunglasses, she tightened the pull cord around her face, grabbed baby Bubber, ran out the door, and drove to a drugstore outside her neighborhood so no one would see her. She was standing in the parking lot, getting Bubber out of his seat, when an old man hollered at her from across the parking lot. He walked closer as he called to her.
    “Hey, mama!” he said.
    “Hey,” she said under her breath, from inside her hood and behind her sunglasses.
    “Hey, you can’t say ‘hey’?” he said, staggering closer. She saw that he was drunk.
    “Hey,” she said louder, and forced herself to smile. Now he was between her and the store.
    “That’s my NEPHEW!” shouted the old man. “Now that is some shit that stink! Give me high five.”
    He threw his hand up in the air and Sunny walked forward. She touched her hand to his hand on the way by. His hand was dry, hard, cold. She pushed on, marching determinedly into the store.
    “You! You!” he called after her. “Stay beautiful, you hear? Stay beautiful.”
    Inside, Bubber threw up in the shopping cart, dribbling innocent baby puke down his front as he sat in the basket with his legs sticking through the holes. She had nothing to wipe it with. It was a total disaster. On that night Sunny knew she could never leave the house without her wig again. There was no way to half-ass it. She had to fully commit.
    *   *   *
     
    “W OW, YOU’RE LIKE AN addict flushing your drugs,” said Les.
    “I have more wigs,” she said.
    “Yeah, I’ve never seen you without that wig, until today,” he said.
    “They all look like that wig, but with different styles. You know, ponytails, braid.”
    From the bridge, the doctor’s office was right around the corner. Les Weathers let her off at the front entrance. Before she got out of the car, he put his