The cushions in the bin were emblazoned with sparkly, silk-screened messages: Every day may not be GOOD, but there is something GOOD every day. A DIAMOND is a chunk of coal that did well under PRESSURE. Difficult ROADS lead to beautiful PLACES. They depressed me — Ah, you’re miserable, aren’t you? they all seemed to be saying. That’s good. That’s as it should be. Irene kept picking up and reading out one cushion-adage after another and asking me if I liked it. And I, being sixteen and impossible, kept saying no. Sometimes, when you’re young and in a situation you feel will never change, everything takes on a swoony, cosmic significance. This was one of those moments for me. Objectively viewed by any reasonable person, I was just being a moody brat. But in the moment, as my mother recited one listless platitude after another, all of which seemed to be extolling, in one way or another, the virtue of suffering — of just sitting and waiting suffering out, and patting yourself on the back for it — I felt like I might go crazy.

Pretty soon Irene got fed up with my monosyllabism and started lobbing the cushions at me the moment I rejected them. I refused to flinch or protest as they bounced off my chest and face and back into the bin. I had a feeling that Irene and I were now trapped in some kind of vortex, that we would spend eternity in the purgatory that was Woolworth’s, fluorescent-lit with a Muzak version of Sheila E.’s “The Glamorous Life” playing above our heads, Irene pulling cushions from the bottomless bin, chucking them forever, me rooted there, unflinching, to receive them.

But then my mother read a cushion that gave me pause.

It’s not about the DESTINATION, but the JOURNEY, she read.

She bunched the cushion in one hand and raised her arm to throw it at me. “Wait,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows.

“That one’s ok,” I said.

She turned the cushion around to read the silk-screened lettering again. “Really? You like this one?”

“Yes,” I said, “because it’s the opposite of what you said before at Boston Pizza.”

Irene peered at me. We had gone to Boston Pizza for lunch and ordered ribs. Without acknowledging it to each other, we had taken advantage of the cushion expedition, and our time away from Kelli, to make an afternoon of it.

“What did I say at Boston Pizza?” asked Irene.

“You basically said what all those other pillows said,” I told her. “You said, ‘I’ll get my reward in the next life.’”

To be fair to Irene, what she actually had said was that having “happy, healthy girls” was her reward. And the only other reward she needed was, as she put it, “waiting for me on the other side.” I have no idea how this came up over baby back ribs and a side salad, but I’d been gritting my teeth over it for the remainder of the afternoon. Irene often got a little philosophical when it was just the two of us — I suspected it was the only opportunity she had to reflect on her life. And perhaps there was something about me — about my attitude toward everything at the time — that brought such musings on.