Who's Irish?

In “The Water Faucet Vision,” the narrator and protagonist tells the story of when she finally gave up her “saintly ambitions” in the fifth grade. The telling of this story is prompted by the narrator hearing from her father the night before, four months after her mother died, letting her know he has decided he cannot live in their childhood home anymore.

This phone call causes the adult narrator to reflect on the time in her life when “the world was a place that could be set right” (46). The narrator tells the story of the year she decided she wanted to be able to do miracles. This was also the year her parents were fighting so badly that her father pushed her mother out the window. The violence in her parents’ fighting is heightened after the narrator and her friend Patty Creamer do everything they can to work a miracle for Pattie’s family: to get her father to come back. The narrator’s mother survives with minimal injuries, which the doctors call a “miracle.” The narrator comments on the miracle that she really wanted at the time, the miracle that would have prevented her mother from being pushed out of the window in the first place.