my mom on the giant dipper

Your mother held her purse on her lap the whole way up the first climb of the Giant Dipper, as if a wooden roller coaster from 1924 might ask to see her ID. She had not been on a ride since before you were born, and she only got on because you asked her right in front of the operator, where saying no would have made a scene.

She screamed the entire way down, one long note, all the way through the tunnel. At the bottom she was windblown and laughing in a way you had never heard her laugh, mascara everywhere, half a cotton candy crushed in her fist, the whole boardwalk smelling of salt and funnel cake and hot sugar. She said never again. Then she rode it with you twice more. She was forty one, you were nine, and you have never been that impressed by anyone since.