It was a matinee. This was the Fifties, so of course it was a Western. It was a few days after a blizzard, and we were a couple minutes late. You know how the buses barely move when it snows, she says. The lobby smelled like fake butter and wet carpet. My mother used her foot to push open the theater door. It was pitch black inside, she says, popping the p in pitch. Not even an usher with a flashlight around to help her find seats. Just as she got the door open, a gunshot rang out from the screen, and of course the kid took off. She calls me the kid. Toddler legs pumping. Socks on the dirty carpet. The kid went flying past the boy taking tickets, out the glass doors, onto the sidewalk. Piles of dirty snow huddled on either side. She always describes the snow and the black bottoms of my white socks as I stepped into the street. It seems important to her that both were dirty. Somehow the dirt made everything harder.

So picture this, she says. She’s in the lobby, frozen. Two coats and a pocketbook over one arm, the other wrapped around a popcorn tub. She’s got Cokes pinched together at their rims dangling from her fingers, and my yellow rain boots clutched in the other hand. So much stuff, she says, so weighed down. And of course she was in heels, too. What was she supposed to do? She could barely move. And outside a Checker cab was driving straight toward her kid.

Oh my God, Gloria, somebody almost always says. Honey, you must have been terrified.

That’s where her story ends.

I can’t imagine how she got me back. No one ever asks.