A Long Time Coming (part 1)

Only the unlucky believe in luck, my mother used to say, and we believe in luck. She said this after I got kicked out of Sanford Day School, my third expulsion this year, for selling my ritalin to overachieving girls in AP English. My mother thought my attention deficiency (diagnosed, aged ten) was her punishment for not knowing who my dad was. I knew different. I knew that you don't ever get punished for the things you've done, for the sleeping around or the failures. Otherwise we'd be in a world of misery with no bit of relief, not ever. That there was still some good in the world, meant to me that atonement was coming a lot further down the road than mother could suspect. I had already figured out that you can't have both. It was either justice or luck, and each meant the other was horse shit. But telling my mother that would only get a sigh from her, and a “if you just focused that brain of yours on somethin' for any length of time, you'd be doin something worthwile.”
We were getting out of town on highway nine when she made that sigh, and we were still on nine when the snow started up. Just a few flakes at first, but soon enough we were plunged into a tornado of white, the car wrapped into fast moving blanket of white, and we with it. Mother just held the wheel tight, and started cursing up a storm of her own, under her breath, fogging up her side of the windshields with “goddamns” until we saw an Econolodge on the right. We pulled off and got a room; she borrowed the last twenty in my pocket to get it.
“There's plenty of money where were headed,” she said, and I just tried to forget about what we'd have to do to get it.