I know how to turn corners. Because I don’t always have the words, I’ve cultivated hobbies. I have enough yarn to make a perfect blue and gray wool blanket. My license expired. The sidewalk is cleared.  Unexpectedly the Bishop was at church this morning.

“Like this?” she tells me, raising both forefingers and tracing the crest of a cartoon wave in the air above the steering wheel. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. Then she drops her knuckly hands back and continues to coast across the parking lot of the local Elks’ Lodge. She wants me to throw my head back and laugh, for us to laugh together, an unbroken chain of mothers and their teenage kids– We Had Totally Different Senses of Humor.

I can tell you how to turn a corner. I’ve been sick for over a week and all of my days are conscious but I’m not always lucid enough to make things. I stack the yarn, fail to email someone back, start crocheting  squares. My roommate had a birthday but I remember how I’m older now and used to be impatient with my inability to string sentences for weeks at a time. In the meantime I’ve learned to twist one string in a bed-sized leaf to wrap you up.

I dream that instead of a gold cross around my neck, I wear three silver rings on the middle finger of my left hand. I have my mother’s hands. They slip over the finger with some difficulty because in the dream my knuckle is still swollen from when I fell down the stairs, months ago. One ring isn’t on my dresser where I left it. It’s the slenderest one– the one for the Son. Oh yeah, I remember, it’s Lent– and leave for work, placated until the ressurrection.

One thing I probably never mentioned is that, although I wasn’t living with her at the time, my mother taught me how to drive. And if I did tell you, then the only story I told is about how, while I was learning to drive, I hit a house. I’m old enough to hear my mother’s voice when I laugh aloud, unexpectedly, from time to time– and to be comforted by it.

If you want to start running then what you do is one morning, you go running. Then the next morning, you go running again. You don’t think about it or add it to any to-do lists. You sneak it up on yourself until the corner is turned.

It was the night time, the end of my first few hours before the wheel. It was dark, it was a stick-shift, it was in the narrow shelf of a T-shaped drive in a cluster of stucco townhouses. The impact shakes the structure. Everyone comes downstairs. Everyone tells the story and it appeals to the Universal Family Sense of Humor.

I can’t write for you but I can build a short stack of squares. When it’s time to turn the corner, it’s really easy: just ch 3, dc 2, ch 1 dc 3 in same st. Dc in next st. In the beginning, the square will be so small and practically all of the stitches will be about turning corners. You’ll get good at it and bored when there’s an expanse between corners. Maybe you’ll get a few inches in and wonder if it’s insufficient humility that’s preventing you from getting bored before there’s another corner to turn. It’s lent. Turning the corners is the easy part.

“Once,” she says, and it’s painful because you are estranged and she wants you to love her and you do not want to love her back, “when I was learning to drive.” This was a mistake, you decide, old for your age and not yet lonesome for her– wondering about this irrelevant story about a grandmother you hardly knew. She’s wasting time. This is annoying. It’s easier to let her just tell the story. In the last few years, your relationship has been a series of corners in rapid-succession. You have publicly hated and loved each other so many times in a row that the joints of the story are starting to swell. You believe that probably you will reconcile soon. It’s always love-love or hate-hate, and hard to say who is mirroring whom. There are a lot of explanations but the only truth is in mirroring.

In honor of insufficient humility, you look back to survey various expanses. It was years between the parking lot. I broke my license in half, showing a friend that it was practically unbreakable. It expired and I didn’t have it renewed. I think, that afternoon, used to driving people around she made eye contact through the rearview. When she wanted to see if the coast was clear, she always twisted over her right shoulder.

“I wanted to show my mom the shape of something and I raised one hand off the wheel and said, ‘like this,’” she scrawls a quick line of cursive e’s across the windshield. Between the corners we pretend everything is normal. It is hard to know whether we are placated until the ressurrection or hoping to sneak normal up on ourselves. I locate her mom’s side and take it. I want her hands on the wheel. I want her to pull over so I can drive. No one has time for jokes.  Off-gas, on-clutch, on-brake, off-brake, clutch still, turn the wheel, on-gas through the turn, I want to tell her. I know, I know. Let me do it.

“‘BOTH HANDS!’ she snapped at me. ‘Okay,’” she laughs, this time lifting both hands from the wheel, “like this?”

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