“Then you should go there.”

I touched her arm and she flinched.

“Please?” She looked away. “You should go.”

I didn’t go far. I sat on the curb a few houses down, just out of sight, and found the rolled socks in my bag. I took out one five-dollar bill and tucked the whole package back into place. I walked to a liquor store on Sunset and bought the cheapest gin I could find, then went next door for a liter of orange juice. I walked to the edge of the bluffs, found an empty bench in the middle of a weed field, and started taking one quick sip after another, going back and forth.

I pictured my mother reading one of her mystery books or lacquering her hair with bright auburn dye, the color stained in ragged peaks across her neck. I’d hated all her rituals when I lived at home, but now I tried to remember every one of them. The gin burned my sore gums. The ocean could have been the desert. It was a big field of darkness without any light.

The house was bright when I went back. The way light came out the windows at night reminded me of yolk coming out of a broken egg. I watched from the bushes for an hour, taking sips, and saw my mother’s figure move through the living room. Her shadow bent to pick up something from the floor. Her head was oddly shaped, too tall, and I knew it was from a towel wrapped around her head. She would be different in the darkness, more broken. I took the gin and orange juice into my mouth at once, let the pool grow warm on my tongue, and then I took it all down, heard my wet throat swallowing.

I knocked and got nothing. I kept knocking, not in rhythmic bursts but continuously—rap rap rap rap rap—until she answered. The angle of the towel was tilted, threatening to topple, and her face was puffy underneath. She’d been crying.

“It didn’t go right before,” I said. “It went all wrong.”

She sighed. “You’re drunk.”

“I’m sad,” I said. “Tonight I’m really, really sad.”

“You should go,” she said. “Don’t make me ask again.”

“I’m not making you do anything!”

She stood there staring at her worn cloth slippers. She wouldn’t raise her head. “I have nothing to say to you, Matilda. Not when you get like this.”

My voice was a rubber band in my throat, pulled tight. I grabbed her shoulders and shook her whole body. The towel fell, and her hair dropped around her shoulders. When she looked up, her eyes showed nothing but a terrible shine, not tears but steel: hard blue shells hiding the hurt underneath.

“You’re my fucking mother!” I yelled. The rubber band had broken. I wanted to shake the feelings out of her body so I could see them. I have nothing…She didn’t have to say the right things. She could say anything. I’d listen to whatever she said.