At ten past nine, just when she’s getting started, my mother is told that she has a call on the phone in the manager’s office, but she’s too busy to take it. At nine-thirty, the phone rings again, but this time no message is brought to my mother. The phone just keeps on with its shrill echo, usually quite a racket in the hush of the bank and even more so with the manager’s door open, the front door locked, and the tellers sitting quietly, cross-legged on the floor with their hands behind their heads.

There are two men. I don’t need to invent what they’re wearing, because I know it is trench coats, sunglasses and caps. One is ransacking the tills, while the other stalks down the line of staff, barking at people to be quiet. He carries a bulky black shotgun-looking thing by the barrel instead of the handle, swinging it by his side as he walks. It’s the way you’d hold a baseball bat if you weren’t actually playing.

There is no alarm. No one managed to get to it. Little League decides to beat access to the safe out of the manager. The phone rings again, and Till Ransacker, swearing, goes into the office and takes it off the hook.

My mother does not take shit from her boys or the universe, and she certainly doesn’t take shit from petty crooks. It does not escape me that what happens next could have been rebellion against the crime that robbed her of her husband, the stupidity of the burglary. Or it could have been rebellion against Little League’s very existence; behind those sunglasses maybe she saw my dad, and everything he’d left her to deal with, when she pulled the trigger. Or maybe she just thought Little League wasn’t holding the shotgun well enough to get off a shot. I can’t settle on which is the most likely.

What I can say is that whatever she felt was enough to make her stand up. What I can say is that thirty seconds later, she has a broken nose and a shotgun in her hands. That Little League is on the floor, scurrying backwards. That my mother brings the gun around. That it’s very close range for a shotgun, close enough to rip someone in half. That Till Ransacker has put his hands up in the air and is telling her to chill out. That she levels the gun at Little League’s chest and – I can’t hazard a guess as to whether she hesitates or not, but I imagine the stupor is gone and she’s as clear-headed as she’s been in a long time – pulls the trigger.

She hits him square in the chest.