“A mother always knows. ”she said. “I also brought you some brownies and Rosemary Clooney’s latest record release. ”
In my late twenties, I was in a terrible automobile accident. By that time, I had graduated from college and moved out of my mother’s house. One night my mother, who always retired promptly at ten with a potboiler novel and a glass of warm milk, decided to watch the eleven o’clock news. She saw a stretcher move across the screen, the body on it flat as a pile of magazines except for two tremendous feet protruding from the sheet. My mother sat up and shook my father awake.
“Get dressed,” she said. “We need to get to the hospital. That’s Lynn Ruth. ”
Time did not diminish my mother’s amazing intuition. In fact, it became sharper as I grew older. When I married, she read my impending divorce right through my bridal veil. When I began my job search, she knew the results of my interviews before I received the rejection4 letters. After I’d