Our mother had terrible hair and not enough of it. A bad combination of fine, thin, soft and straight, she and her hairdresser bleached and rolled, ratted and pulled it into a poufy platinum ball every Friday, spraying enough lacquer on it to varnish a fair-sized coffee table. The style was Phyllis McGuire with her mobster boyfriend, very Rat Pack. She wrapped her head with toilet paper and slept on a special pillow, but by Tuesday it would be deflated, the sides flat and folded like old rose petals smashed between the pages of a book. She might wave a brush at a few strands near her ears on Wednesday; Thursday was a gluey limp to Getting Her Hair Done.

When we moved to San Diego and the Friday hair appointments began, I was seven years old. From photographs, I can tell she must have washed and curled and fussed with her hair like other war brides of her time, but I don’t remember seeing her do it. I know for a fact, though, that after 1957 her hair never got wet except in a beauty shop’s shampoo bowl. Much later, when I was a teenager and we had a pool in our backyard, she occasionally swam, doing this weird sidestroke, and magically kept even her neckline dry.

The house with the pool was the biggest and the first two-story place we lived in. There were four bedrooms – the master bedroom and two small ones downstairs and one big bedroom with its own bath upstairs, all by itself, a prize that was finally mine when I was in high school and my hateful older brother left home. At the bottom of the stairwell, right across the hall, was Craig’s little bedroom in the downstairs corner with his twin bed and smelly baseball socks. If you didn’t count the fact that our mother was an established lush by then, it was a pretty nice place to live, and we were cruising along, mostly staying out of trouble.

There were the usual pranks, of course, and games that often ended, as the saying goes, with someone getting hurt. We played Got You Last for hours, chasing each other around the inside of the house, out into the yard, leaping over furniture and dogs and diving boards, panting and giggling. Lock Candy in the Garage was fun, too, except when it was dark and Candy’s demands to open the door got shrill. Spraying each other with the garden hose was another winner, except that time Craig was losing to our brother (Bill) so badly he almost barreled in through the front door with the hose going full blast.

Now that I think about it, many of the chasing/payback games were water-based in those years. Maybe it was because of the pool, just the idea of all that splashy blue stuff. I don’t know. And the details are a little sketchy on what exactly had happened that day Craig tried to copy the water bucket thing.

It’s a classic. If you ever watched cartoons back in the ‘sixties, you know it. A bucket full of water balanced on the top of a partially open door. Get someone to walk in, push the door open, the bucket tips, et voila.

But if you’re my dorky 12-year-old brother, you will mess it up somehow.

Bill the bully had come over from his on-campus place to do laundry one afternoon and started a fight with Craig who wound up getting in trouble, an injustice that was all too common. Craig was in his bedroom, plotting. I was upstairs in my palatial apartment, talking on the phone or doing homework or something. He called me from downstairs – “Hey, Candy, come here” – and I said, “Fat chance.” This went on with a disappointing lack of ingenuity for a while. I smelled a rat because he would never want me to come to his room and even if he did, he would never ask me to. But we finally met in the hallway and he told me the plan, so I was hiding halfway up the stairs while he set up the water trap, using a big plastic bowl. Then he sat back on his bed with the best view of the doorway (and where I could see his face through the door crack) and called, “Hey, Bill, come here a second.”

We heard him coming down the hall. We heard him say something. And then we heard Mom’s voice and saw her suddenly right outside Craig’s door, her rebuilt Friday cotton candy helmet gleaming in its full-varnish state right there above her ears, and she smiled and said, “Craig, do you want this?” as she pushed the door open just hard enough and just fast enough that the bowl did a perfect 180, spilled all that water in one bloop directly on the top of her head, then landed and sat there like a perfect plastic hat, little drops raining off the edges onto her shoulders.

In her hand was a glass half full of chocolate milkshake, a peace offering she’d made for having blamed the wrong kid.

Craig, his almond eyes round as silver dollars, uttered a tentative “No?”

Still dripping, she hissed, “You take this right now.”

He did.

She took the bowl off her head and huffed, back straight and knees high, toward the master bathroom.

After the door closed, we looked at each other, him on his bed, me crouched on the stairs, for what felt like a frozen five minutes, waiting for the floor to open up and swallow him into hell. When it didn’t, we started to laugh and couldn’t stop, hands pasted over our mouths like duct tape. Bill slunk out of the house.  That evening, at least one drink later, we heard Mom retelling the story on the phone and chuckling.

Life is full of surprises.

My younger brother Craig has cancer, the same kind that killed our dad, and it’s likely it will kill him too unless some random thing (drunk driver, bacteria-infested cantaloupe, falling meteor) gets him first. He is dealing with this handful of crap by delighting in buttering all possible things and pouring cream in his coffee, in ripping up his internist’s reminder to schedule a colonoscopy – “Stick it up your ass,” he crows.  He made me promise to ix-nay the ama-dray, but he never said I couldn’t write about it.

This piece was originally published on my website and was there entitled "The Gravity of Water and Mistakes." This week's posts can be found by clicking on Adobe Soup: the Unzipped Life of Candace Mann and scrolling down the home page. Thanks for reading - either here or there!