Kanlaon

It’s late at night, self should be going to bed, but instead she picks up last Sunday’s Chronicle. The sentence that catches her eye is this:

“It’s the call that every parent fears from the moment your child is born . . . You expect to hear, ‘There’s been a car crash.’ You don’t expect, your daughter has been attacked in a bakery.”

Self has seen son twice this summer. The second time was when she went with him to rent a tow-truck and a dollie so that he could pick up his disabled car in King City. It’s true that she fears an accident every time he drives north and back. Mostly, she worries that he will fall asleep and drift off the road. And so she reads the newspaper story with more than usual interest.

In the story self reads, a 15-year-old girl, sheltered, who attends a private school in San Francisco, drops by the Borders in Stonetown after school. This is the same Borders that self read in, over two years ago. It was March. This was her first reading for her second collection, Mayor of the Roses. Self sees the store so clearly in her mind as she reads the story.

The teen-ager proceeds to West Portal and walks up Portola Drive, looking for a snack. Self, too, has walked on this very street. She, too, has eaten there when she used to teach a writing class at San Francisco State.

The teen-ager enters a bakery. At which point, the story becomes very strange: As the girl is leaving the store, a man hits her — hard — on the back of the head.

Self’s question is: Why this particular girl?

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