By the time Mama gets home from work, I am in bed, and not dead. Without a knock, she lurches into my room, plunks down beside me, and reaches to stroke the side of my head like I’m a pitiful old cat. Her hand rests on the thick forest of mouse-brown scrub brush. She starts laughing.

“Ahhh, remember the time you shaved off your eyebrows and cut your bangs an inch long and they stuck straight out? So ya drew new eyebrows on with a piece of charcoal and glued your hair down with egg whites? What was that, the first day of grade six?”

Grade seven. My first day of junior high in Loch Bhreagh. Char and Allie were strangers, but they saved me that day when they overheard Marcus King call me Oscar the Spunk Can before the first bell rang. Despite the eyebrows, the bangs plastered down with what looked like dried semen, and the obvious social liability I represented, Allie came and sat by me. Gently, diplomatically, she offered me her new headband to make my bangs look almost normal. Then she led me to the girls’ bathroom, where Char was waiting with a brow pencil and a copy of Seventeen magazine. By lunchtime, I’d begun to successfully fade into the Loch Bhreagh junior high scene. Until Char grabbed Marcus King by the nuts and told him if she heard anyone call me Oscar the Spunk Can again, she’d castrate him with a badminton racket and an emery board. It was harder to blend in after that.

I can’t be bothered to tell Mama any of that now. I just want to lie here like a bump on a log and listen to her voice.

“Mama, sing me a lullaby, wouldja?” I mumble.

For a minute, she looks as if she has forgotten that Sarah Spenser is selling our home out from underneath us. That money is tighter than ever. That word is going around the Gale that she got caught drinking on the night shift. That her only child is dying. For a minute, Mama looks almost happy as her voice lilts into song, her foot gently tapping out the tune of the only lullaby I can ever remember her singing to me.

There was liquor on the barroom floor,

And the bar was closed for the night.

When out of his hole came a little black mouse,

And he sat in the pale moonlight.

He lapped up the liquor on the floor,

and on his haunches he sat.

And all night long, you could hear him sing,

“Oh bring out the goddamn cat!”

Her hands linger on my head for a few moments after she finishes singing, and I can’t help but laugh at the fact that this is what passes for soothing comfort now. Gnarled, calloused hands on my throbbing, shaved head, and an off-key foot-stomped song about a drunk, fearless mouse in a bar.