my mom on the giant dipper

My 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 I was born, and she only got on because I 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 I 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 me twice more. She was forty one, I was nine, and I have never been that impressed by anyone since.