There was only one tomato left when my mother called Sonja and me to come for worship that fateful morning. As she read to us from Psalms, she was not listening to the rhythm of the words or to the language that was usually violins and oboes; she was instead deliberating over when to pick the tomato. Today, she finally decided, just as soon as I put Sonja’s hair into braids.

“Of course the monkey got it,” my father will later say. “Murphy’s Law.”

“I don’t know,” my mother will respond. “I had a hunch, and I should have followed it.” Sonja and I will add nothing to the conversation, listening only as the bitter tomato is tasted again and again.

The loss of the tomato puts my mother in a bad mood, worse because she is aware of how pathetic it was for a tomato to throw her off kilter. All morning she refuses to take us down to see the kittens. “I’m too busy,” she says, looking up from a stack of papers. “Can’t you see I’m busy?” Later, she throws clothes in the machine. “I have to hang them when they’re done.” Sonja and I lurk behind every corner, cajoling. But you said we could go after you finished grading. It’s no fair. We never do anything fun. How will the kittens learn to love us, if we don’t see them? You promised, remember?

“Why can’t we go alone?” Sonja asks. We often roam the hill without our mother’s protection; a trip to the bottom would not be so different. Of course, there is the mamba. We are all learning to live with this tragedy, though for the mothers it is the hardest. Few of us children knew the little girl, but the mothers see the event as both a tragedy and a warning: Watch your kids.

“All right, you can go,” our mother says finally and tries not to smile as we dance about the living room.
“We’re going to see the kittens, kittens, kittens,” we sing to the tune “Ring Around the Rosy,” our arms outstretched, our bodies spinning in widening circles. When we collapse on the couch, she states the rules: Stay together. If you see a snake, don’t move. Take the road not the path. Stay an hour and then come straight home.

“Go and change into something clean,” she says, swatting our bottoms as we raced past her and down the hall. “You look like something the cat dragged in.”

Our mother is not watching as we set across the yard toward our usual shortcut, a mouth slashed into the jungle’s flank. It is not an act of disobedience, but of habit.

“Didn’t mommy tell us to take the road?” I say, finally. Trust me to remember, for I am the obedient one.

“Oh,” Sonja says, and we pause at the edge of the yard, straddled between two possibilities. “We’re already here.” The unspoken knowledge passing between us is that the path is much faster. Yet there is something else compelling us forward, something we feel but cannot articulate: hypocrisy. We have been scrambling about this jungle for as long as we can remember, the danger of mambas no less then, no more now.