What does James feel happens to his mother? Chapter 16

Her best friend Irene, a black woman, passed away, and his mother refused to attend the memorial service. She was done with funerals, she said. She was determined to learn how to drive a car, something that scared the hell out of James. He notes the interesting fact that as eighteen-year-old Rachel Shilsky in Suffolk, his mother had known how to drive perfectly. That girl, however, was dead, and Ruth McBride Jordan couldn't drive.