So my kid is watching Saturday morning cartoons and says to me, Road Runner looks dumb, and I stop answering work emails that I shouldn’t even be reading because it’s the weekend, and I mull this over and ask her, Sweetie, what’s so dumb about Road Runner? and I hit pause on the remote and think about driving through Tucson with her long-gone dad with his snake-oil salesman dreams and seeing a road runner lift its feathers to sunbathe on a cold morning and I remember that bird shaking a scorpion in its beak but nothing much about the man himself except, come to think of it, how he reminds me now of Wile E. Coyote with his Acme catalog of explosives, earthquake pills, super vitamins, rocket sled kits, and portable holes, and how all of it was Looney Tunes—nothing worked—and I ruffle up the kid’s hair into a purple crest and say, I think Road Runner is kind of cute, like you baby girl,

and she swats my hand away and says Anyway, Road Runner acts dumb, and I run some episodes in my head and come up empty so I ask, How does the Road Runner act dumb? and she says, rolling her eyes, It’s a bird and it can’t even fly, so I tell her, Yeah, it does look like a hot mess trying to fly, but picture us burning rubber out of Baltimore in the old Malibu with all our earthly possessions thrown in the backseat, and your dad on the porch shaking his fist with one hand and a can of Pabst in the other—and, yeah, it’s just like that, and I see on her face she’s feeling it, that running so fast and both of us flipping the bird out both our windows while we hit all the potholes and our underwear and shoes bounce all over the back of the car, and thinking back, I smile at the kid and say, like Road Runner, meep meep, though I know for real its voice is more of a coo, like that sound I made spooning her on a vibrating bed in a motel off I-95, but a mother has to keep it real so

I tell her, Sweetie, a road runner eats rattlesnakes for breakfast, a road runner makes magic tracks so you can’t tell if it’s coming or going, a road runner leaves a trail of fire—I believe enough of this is true—with my serious parent face and hit the remote button again when Road Runner runs right through the fake road painting on the rock wall with Wile E. Coyote in hot pursuit, which of course results in him running into the rock to the sound of crashing cymbals and landing flat on his face and not only that but Road Runner runs back through the painting and knocks him over again and my kid looks at me at says, Aw, poor Wile E. Coyote, then rolls on the carpet laughing, and I sign out of work and whatever sorry for the delay in responding email I was writing and roll on the carpet with her, laughing, saying meep meep whenever I get my breath back.