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herself.
    “If I go, can we stop at the pharmacy?” I said.

    Sometimes, after a late-night ambulance call, if the call had been especially sad or bloody or if someone young had been involved, Audrey would come to my room when she got home and sit on the edge of my bed with a drink and talk about her life, her memories. It was always worth staying awake for, what she said, and if I felt my eyes closing I’d pinch myself; there was no other way to learn about her past. She hadn’t kept pictures, both her parents were dead, and her only sibling, a sister, lived in Florida and didn’t keep in touch. Her father, who’d been the team physician for the Michigan football program, hadn’t been kind to his daughters, I’d gathered, and going their separate ways when they grew up was their way of forgetting their time with him. As for their mother, they’d never really known her; she’d died of breast cancer when they were small.
    The story Audrey told most often was the story of how she’d met my father. They’d come together at a Rose Bowl party when Michigan beat USC in Pasadena. Mike was a linebacker nicknamed “the Hatchet” for his low and devastating tackles. Audrey was a nursing student. Her father had brought her along to see the game, wangling her a seat on the team plane, where Mike first caught her eye. Sitting next to Woody Wolff himself and obviously a leader and a star, he wore a buzzcut, a loud Hawaiian shirt, and was actually exercising in his seat; curling a pair of dumbbells with his eyes shut. She’d never seen such concentration, she told me, or such a lean and tightly made male body. “He interestedme as a specimen,” she said. “I know that sounds cold, but I was cold back then.” She asked her father about him before the party and learned that Mike had the slowest pulse and largest lung capacity he’d ever come across.
    The victory party was held outside, under the first real palm trees Audrey had ever seen. She never forgot to mention the trees. Mike couldn’t dance, so she had him to herself, and as they drank and talked he let a secret slip: he’d heard something tear in his knee during the game and was finding it hard to stand up. “That did it,” she told me. “The thought of such a perfect man in pain sent me around the bend somehow. I swooned. Here I’d been muddling along through nursing school as a way to please my dad, and suddenly up pops this god who needs my help.” In fact, Audrey told me, she sensed immediately what Mike would only decide after his surgery—his football career was finished—and it thrilled her. A man who might have cast her off if his future had played out as planned had ended up dependent on her care. They married before Mike’s senior year was out, while he was still on crutches.
    I found it hard to look Audrey in the eye during these late-night chats in my bedroom. I couldn’t stand her beauty. It made me fidget. To have such a good-looking woman for a mother didn’t seem fair to me; it raised expectations for my future love life that I feared would never be fulfilled. When Audrey was my age, I felt, she wouldn’t have noticed me; the only way someone like mecould hold the gaze of someone like her was to be her child. Her son.
    “You’ll always be my baby,” she sometimes said, rising from my bed after our talks, and nothing made me madder. I felt cheated. Unlike Mike and the other young men she’d known, who’d had the chance to make winning first impressions, I’d met her when I was helpless, speechless, tiny.
    Wrecking her essay was my chance to get even—with her, with idols like Johnson, with the Hatchet. I wasn’t proud of myself, but there it was.

    At breakfast the next morning I played sick again. I coughed into a tissue and pretended I couldn’t eat my bowl of Oat Rings, a cheap bulk cereal Mike made Audrey buy instead of Cheerios. As a retailer himself, Mike knew the cost of building national brand names, and he refused to pay