I fished out the key, slowly, as if I were a thief. She watched as I crouched and reached under the flowerpot. One afternoon, the Amway lady turned the car engine off when we reached my house. I felt intoxicated by the certainty that she would never leave me, that she was always within arm’s reach. My nose flooded with her faint acidic-sweet scent. I would press my face into my mother’s lower back. The whitewashed walls of the endless row houses reflected the brilliance of the flaring light. On particularly cloudless days, when the sky was a pale blue all the way down the horizon, it was difficult to keep my eyes open. Then I held an umbrella from behind, my other arm wrapped around my mother’s waist while my bony butt perched precariously on a metal rack that served as a back seat.Įither way, I hugged my mother tightly, drenching myself in her sweat as she pedaled across different neighborhoods of identical row houses. It was the afternoons you had to worry about. In the morning, we rode to school in a cool, pleasant breeze. Look at her now, suffering under the hot sun, bumping up and down on that immovable tank of a bicycle. My mother accused my father of torturing her - before she got pregnant with me, he’d promised to buy a family car. This was before my father could afford to pay her for all five days of the week. I wanted to know what it would take to grow up to be someone like her. The lady sold Amway products and took the neighborhood children to school for a modest fee. On Thursdays and Fridays, I rode in a lady’s air-conditioned sedan.

It was a military-grade clunker left to her by her dead father, who used to ride it to work at the palm oil estates that wrapped around the outer perimeter of the town. My mother took me on the back of a bicycle on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays.

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