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Dan Donnelly
was a bare-knuckled prize fighter from Dublin who became one of Ireland's most celebrated sportsmen when he defeated English prizefighter George Cooper after eleven rounds in 1815. Donnelly died at the age of thirty-two, his corpse stolen days after his funeral and the remains later traced to the home of a Dublin surgeon who agreed to return them on the condition that he could amputate and keep Donnelly's right arm, the one that had claimed so many victories. In 1953, the owner of the Hideout public house in Kilcullen put the mummified arm on display in the pub, where it remains.

As
General Stonewall Jackson
and his staff were returning to camp on May 2, 1863, they were mistaken for a Union cavalry force and fired upon. Hit by two bullets, Jackson's left arm had to be amputated and was buried at the Ellwood house in Orange County near the field hospital. In 1921 during a U.S. Marine training exercise, Marine Commander General Smedly Butler, skeptical that Stonewall Jackson's arm was buried nearby, took a squad of Marines to dig up the spot—where he found the arm in a wooden box. He replaced the box with a metal one and reburied it under a granite marker, which says simply: “Stonewall Jackson's arm—Buried May 3, 1863.”

I know instantly that this clumsy propaganda is Mom's doing. Annoyed, I slap the book shut and stand suddenly straight up, conking my head, hard, on the sloping attic ceiling. Worse, it's the left side of my head and my stump instinctively leaps to rub it, squirming futilely; I drop the book from my right hand and struggle without success to reach the aching part of my skull. (And I swear, I hear sirens.)

And that's how Dad finds me—hunched over under the low ceiling like Gollum, swearing, my arm craned around and behind my head as if trying to apply a half nelson to my own self—when he peeks up to tell me Mom's here.

 

MOM

The fire engine pulls away and a mustachioed firefighter a decade younger than Mom waves at her from his perch on the back, while the driver toots three quick blasts from the horn. Mom waves back and turns to find me in the doorway, her narrow face framed in a chin-length bob unfamiliar to me. (She'd always worn her hair long.) Immediately, her eyes drop to the place my arm should be and she says, “That doesn't look so bad.”

Unlike Dad, Mom is no withholding stoic. But neither is she capable of hysteria. Since leaving Dad (the reasons remain a little vague), she's become something of a Zen master of her own life, living in a yurt and quietly accepting every condition and circumstance of the universe around her, even when that universe chooses to snap off the arm of her only son.

“But that's exactly what it is,” I disagree. “So. Bad.”

She pulls me into her embrace, and as I clutch her with my good arm and my face hits her shoulder I begin to cry, uncontrollably, tears flowing and body shaking. I make no sound, as if that one concession makes this any less humiliating.

My father grabs his jacket and heads for the door. “I'm going to put some gas in the car.”

“There, there,” Mom reassures me, and I feel oddly comforted by the meaningless redundancy.

*   *   *

When I was a small boy, Mom was a chain-smoking pool shark. She'd spend hours at the table in our basement, cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, practicing cut shots, corner hooks, caroms, and kill shots—practical shots the way they might happen in a legal game. (Trick shots were “bullshit,” she assured me.) She preferred the linear simplicity of nine ball, striking balls in ascending numbers over the more random solids and stripes of eight ball. Mom liked things linear if not orderly; I'm pretty sure she named me “Aaron” to afford me the lifelong advantage of being first in any alphabetically ordered lineup that didn't include aardvarks.

I'd empty Mom's ashtrays and rack all the solid balls in a diamond-shaped cluster, organization she'd undo in a hurry, stubbing out a succession of butts and scattering balls with a thunderclap break that reverberated through the house. Leaning over the table, she bore some resemblance to a praying mantis, all skinny limbs stretched at odd angles from the end of her backless heel to the tips of her fingers, dusty with chalk. Elbow swinging behind her, she'd lean low and I'd stand close to her, surreptitiously inhaling her smoke as if her cigarette were mine. I missed them when she stopped suddenly one day, after we'd taken down an old basement painting of a racehorse and it revealed a clean rectangle against walls gray with smoke. It was as cautionary as a spot on an x-ray, and Mom stubbed out her last cigarette. (Unable to find a replacement painting of similar dimensions we returned the racehorse to its place, where it still runs today.)

Mom was penurious in her love, releasing it in small and infrequent doses like a shipwreck victim might ration just enough water to survive. But as she circled the table, eyes never leaving the felt battlefield, I'd linger close enough for a soft pat on the top of my head as she passed, a brief caress of my hair I can still call up from memory. Then she'd lean down and repeat the cycle—smoke, swing, stroke, slam, crash, drop, circle, pat on the head.

I remember feeling sorry for the billiard balls, nestled safely together under the protection of the triangle until it was lifted, left to face the concussive force of the cue ball. As the security of their huddle was shattered, some fell instantly into darkness while others were left to drift and roll, perhaps pondering their fates as they were stalked and dispatched by the cue ball like victims in an Agatha Christie novel. Sometimes their own numbered brethren were complicit in their downfall, set in motion by the cue ball and crashing them into dark pockets of oblivion. But even the cue ball had no will of its own; it was just a thug doing the bidding of the cue stick, and the cue stick didn't give a shit about anything.

*   *   *

Mom and I sit in the yard as night falls, outdoor lights attracting a horde of flying insects and casting their giant, fluttering shadows. She crosses one pant-suited leg over the other, a backless shoe dangling, waiting to drop. We sip lemonade made from lemons fallen from the Jaffes' tree on our side of the fence. I remember as a kid Dad telling us,
If it falls on our side of the fence, it's ours,
and always hoping something more valuable than lemons might someday land in our yard, like luggage full of diamonds from a passing plane, or sixteen-year-old Pam Jaffe tumbling naked out of her window into Mom's zinnias.

“Have you thought about a prosthetic?” Mom sips her drink coolly.

“They're expensive. And cumbersome. I don't have my elbow or lower muscles to really work one of the good ones. Pain in the ass to put on and take off, and they'll rub the skin raw. Last thing I need is an infection.”

“You'll see some money from insurance,” Mom says, dismissing multiple arguments by addressing only one of them, a lion tamer cowing the lead lion so the others fall in line. “They can do amazing things these days.”

“
We can rebuild him, better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster
.”

“Honey, you can wallow all you want. I'm immune.”

“Was I wallowing? I thought I was flaunting my bionic wit.”

“You're not the first one in this family to have these kinds of problems. Your father had a pacemaker put in last spring. Actually, a cardio-defibrillator. For arrhythmia.”

“How come no one bothered to tell me that?”

She shrugs. “It's no big deal.”

“Really,
no big deal.
Come lie on the table and let me stab you in the chest and jam a bunch of electronics under your skin and run wires into your heart.”

“It's a very common procedure.”

“Then I
am
the first one in the family to have this kind of problem. Because this”—I wave my nub at her—“is sort of a big deal.”

“This is why I worry about you, honey. When things are bad, you pour accelerant on them.” Mom quietly sips her drink. “These would be better with vodka.”

I'm embarrassed to tell her mine
has
vodka, a splash snuck from Dad's liquor cabinet when she wasn't looking. As I returned the bottle I noticed the $5.98 price tag, and the name, Fleischmann's, a brand I wouldn't want to drink unadorned by Mr. Jaffe's lemons and gobs of sugar.

“I know it's hard,” she says. “Talk to me. Tell me anything.”

“It's surprising how difficult it is to pick your nose.”

Mom refuses to be rattled. “Is that what you want to talk about, nose picking? Fine, let's do that, then.”

She gets up and heads inside, and I follow, the slamming of the screen door behind me that once announced the comings and goings of her children now just another angry noise I make.

“I'm serious,” I insist as she leans under the liquor cabinet that was once theirs and produces the Fleischmann's. “It's one of those things you don't think about.”

“No, I don't.” She pours an impressive amount of barely distilled vodka in both her virgin glass and my already sullied one.

“Try it,” I challenge her. “Try picking your nose with your opposite hand.”

“You think I won't?”

And of course she does, sticking her left pinky in her right nostril.

“Everything's backward, right?” I coax her. “It's like trying to tie your shoes in a mirror.”

“Yes, I see where it's hard,” she snorts. “Everything is just a little off.”

“It's worse with your index finger,” I go in hard with mine. “Everything just feels flimsy, like you could pull your nose off.”

That's how Dad finds us on his return, both picking our noses in his kitchen, his bottle of Fleischmann's a guilty accomplice.

“Right,” he finally says. “There never was anything to do in this town.”

“Aaron was just showing me how hard things are with one arm.”

Without a word, Dad pulls a coffee cup from the sink and pours the last of the Fleischmann's into it in an act of muscle memory.

“Another dead soldier,” I declare as he drains the bottle.

“Not yet,” he reminds me.

Dad had fostered a theory of relative emptiness, that every so-called empty bottle still had eleven drops left. He'd proven it serially over hundreds of beer, wine, and liquor bottles at dinnertime across the decades, his wide-eyed children awestruck over this tiny miracle. Sometimes we'd erupt with glee that the drops had ceased at ten, and he'd say nothing, just hold it there and wait for that eleventh drop that was always forthcoming; when challenged that there might in fact be
more
than eleven drops, Dad would hold the bottle in place for minutes and not another drop emerged. Children like to believe their parents are capable of miraculous things, however small.

“I thought we'd go get some Chinese,” Dad announces, holding the empty bottle over his mug.

One.

“A restaurant?” Mom gasps playfully. “I'm in.”

Two.

“What about your boyfriend?” I ask with the maturity of a taunting schoolboy.

Three.

“He'll eat at the firehouse with the guys,” Mom smooths the shirtsleeve over my nub. “And don't try to provoke me. If you want to talk about my ‘boyfriend,' let's.”

Four. Five.

“Let's not.”

Six.

“I'm fine with that too.”

Seven.

“Your
Zen
is getting a little annoying. The universe is not a complacent place.”

Eight. Nine.

“It's whatever you perceive it to be.”

Ten.

“I want it to be a universe of armless beings, where the one-armed man is king.”

Eleven.

“‘Want' and ‘perceive' are different things, honey.” She pats my head the way she used to around the pool table, giving me goose bumps.

Dad continues to hold the upturned bottle in place a long beat, awaiting the drop that never comes, before setting it down. He sips, hiding a satisfied smile behind the lip of his mug, and I'm oddly reassured that Dad is still capable of small miracles.

 

FORTUNE

Dad signs the check at Dim Sum & Then Some, pocketing the restaurant's pen—extracting his personal rebate against the extravagance of dining out. (Over the years, he'd collected thousands of pens, bundled in rubber bands all over the house.) Mom scoops up her fortune cookie, and I reach and miss mine completely, the interaction of three Tsingtaos and two Vicodin doing their job with the efficiency of the men who built the railroads. While dubious of a fortune cookie's ability to prognosticate—after all, none had ever warned me of a one-armed future—I nonetheless crave some tiny bit of hope to look forward to. Instead, I get:

Good luck is the result of good planning

“See, this isn't even a fortune, it's … some kind of homily.” I bite into a chunk of cookie. “And a statement of dubious fact. Was my bad luck bad planning? Did I turn left instead of right, leave later instead of earlier? Is bad planning what put me in the path of a speeding SUV?”

“Just because one thing is true doesn't mean the opposite is,” Dad says, coming as close as he has to acknowledging my “bad luck.” “
A small dog may bite
doesn't necessarily mean a big dog won't.”

“Wouldn't ‘big cat' be the opposite of ‘small dog'?”

Mom reads hers, proclaiming:

A member of your family will soon do something to make you proud

“The burden's on Jackie. I'm a little spent.”

“Well, in fact, your sister's coming to visit.”

“What?”

“When you say
What?
, does that mean you didn't hear me, or you're so thrilled with the news that you want me to say it twice?”

“She doesn't have to do that.”