My mom and I were driving to church when we came upon a dead raccoon on the side of the road. I don’t know who was the first to suggest it, but the other agreed and we both got out of the car to lug the animal into the backseat.

I watched her stare at the raccoon through the rearview mirror. It bobbed around on a beach towel, laying with its teeth bared. Its little hands were pointed upwards and they shook when the car started going.

My mom had begun acting strange recently. She was hiding things throughout the house, like long rusty nails and potatoes that had been brought back to life. If you’ve never seen them before, they sprout pale shoots from their eyes and eventually those blossom into something purple and pointed that doesn’t quite look like it’s from the natural world. I woke up to three under my pillow one morning, the roots scratching at my bare shoulders and tapping the white wall above my bed. And these potatoes could not go in the garbage, not as far as my mom was concerned. I had to go out in my pajamas and dig them a place in the backyard. “There’s a storm coming and it might be here any minute,” she said from the back porch then went back inside the house.

“There’s a storm coming and it might be here any minute,” I murmured as I dug through the dirt with my tiny spade. “The hole’s not going to be big enough,” I yelled back in the direction of the house once I saw the roots splayed out on the wet grass. The potatoes looked like big bugs. “I’ll be digging all day,” I called out.

The whole time I wanted to know where she’d gotten these potatoes from. Had she kept them in her closet until the roots got this big? How had she snuck into my bedroom that night to tuck them into bed with me? Lately I’ve been having trouble sleeping as it is. I widened the hole and tried making sense of things.

Before my dad died he would say that a mother can see you through every stage of life all at once and that’s why it seems like they’re punishing you for things you haven’t done yet. And that’s why it seems like they always see you as a little kid. And that’s why, my dad said, you should always stick by your mom.

I didn’t like seeing those potatoes in that hole though. It scared me to look at them, but I think they prepared me for the dead raccoon stinking up the sedan.

“What kind of person kills a raccoon?” my mom said.

“Maybe they were in a hurry.”

“The raccoon is the bandit of the animal kingdom.”

“And, they eat garbage,” I said.

“Yes. I‘ve never met a person who would do you that kindness,” said my mom, in her own way telling me that we were not going to eat the animal.

“We should bury it in the backyard!” I suggested. “You know, like the potatoes.”

She yelped. She gripped tightly on the steering wheel. “Now you’re making me doubt as to whether you would have killed the raccoon too, huh? Always in a hurry. You see, this is why I drive the car and you sit in the passenger’s seat,” she said, then pulled onto the highway.

“Poor animal,” I said.

She grabbed my hand, “That’s exactly right.”

◆

We hadn’t missed a Sunday in five weeks, but I couldn’t think of us leaving the raccoon to bake in the morning sun while we went in to listen to the sermon.

We’d been driving for a while when we came to an abandoned field off the side of the highway. My mom pulled the car over and turned the engine off. She sat there looking through her purse, pulling out sandwich bags of colored beads and jewels.

I had been wandering around the woods behind our house a few weeks ago, and spotted a cowbird with a plastic ruby super-glued to its forehead. It followed me into my dreams. So often it felt like she was one step ahead of me in life.

I opened the backseat and saw the raccoon laying there, its chest bulging. Its fur was stiff. I reached out to touch it and a jolt went up my fingers. I wanted to vomit. I started pulling it from the car, but it was heavy and as big as my torso.     

My throat started closing up and I wanted to cry. For the first time that morning, I felt like we were doing something morally wrong. At least on the side of the road, the raccoon had been nobody’s business.

“Wait,” my mom said, “we’ll carry it together.” She hurried around to the other side of the car and we lifted it out.

She said, “Let’s hope that the animal world can forgive us for being human beings,” as we lugged the raccoon down to the middle of the field.

“We can only hope,” I said. 

“We can do more than hope,” she told me. We put it down on the overgrown grass. My mom told me she was going to get some supplies she still needed from the car.

She said there was a cardboard sign farther down by the roadside where the field starts turning into a forest. “See if you can get us the wooden stake it’s on,” she said. She must have seen the sign on the way here. I’d missed it. One step ahead of me again, and still I felt like I was walking inside of her mind because she was so sure and I was full of doubt.

◆

The sign read, “All This Could Be Yours,” above a phone number. It was right up next to the road and when cars passed by you got a rush of cold air on you. It felt like the cars were breathing.

I yanked the whole sign out, then I ran until my legs felt like jelly. I made it to where my mom was. She was kneeling in front of the raccoon. She had covered it in so many glass pearls and colored beads that the raccoon looked like the statue of a saint. I couldn’t believe what she had done with it. I ripped the cardboard sign off its staples and handed her the thin wooden stake.

“I’m not there yet,” she said. “Put that down.”

She took all the beads cupped in her hand and poured them into mine. “You do the face,” she said.

I said, “I don’t know what to do.”

She repeated, “Do the face,” nudging me forward with her chin. And I saw it for the first time in her exasperation, the sweat trailing down her forehead, that had smeared her foundation, that had left her with two dark circles of eyeshadow, that what we were doing was too strange, even for her, and any car that happened by on the highway could be driven by someone who would call the police upon seeing a mother and child in their church clothes at the funeral of a raccoon. The cops could already be on their way to separate us. Or maybe she thought that all this would finally make me lose faith in her. I nodded and told her I’d do the face.

I placed one bead after the other down the raccoon’s snout. I picked the red ones for its mouth. I picked the blue ones for its eyes. And it wasn’t until I was done that I realized my mom hadn’t done anything besides kneel there; maybe she was praying. She was the one who was crying. “That’s good,” she said, “Good job.” She pulled her earrings off. They were real gold and had been a gift from my dad. She super-glued one into each of the raccoon’s hands and then together we mounted it on the wood with cord and left it there in the field. The police never came, and the raccoon was no longer a raccoon, at least not one that I’d ever seen before.

We stood there less than a minute before my mom said, “Let’s go home.”

When we got to the car, for a while neither of us said anything. We both stared straight ahead.

I told her: Mom, there were no markings on the raccoon that I remember. If I had been hit by a car I think I’d have been in worse shape.

“That’s what you think because you’re not a raccoon,” she said.

“Maybe it died of fright.” I said.

Poor animal, she told me, and I agreed.