28.
“I JUST NEED MY MORPHINE PUMP AND A CHECKBOOK,” my mother said as the palliative care nurse and the night nurse helped her into her bedroom. Helped. Maybe that’s a euphemism. They carried her, one on each side.
She wore the loose-fitting Mexican embroidered cottons I’d left for her at the hospital, looked too thin to be wearing them.
I knew people would still call her beautiful, but she had that look of death now – eyes sunken, teeth too prominent.
She’d never asked to come home from the hospital, had in fact refused to leave, but this was how they released people. This was how they released my mother, anyway. The only other option was Casa Que Pasa, the nursing home where the state itself had deemed residents in “immediate jeopardy.”
As the nurse-women lifted her into her hospice bed and started hooking up the tubes, my mother gazed at a painting of a crow on the wall. “That’s the last painting I bought,” she sighed. “It’s my friend. My crow. The artist found my crow dead out on the old highway. Think of that. She painted its portrait. She used its bones in art pieces. She buried its organs. She let the river carry away its feathers. Think of all that.”
The night nurse’s face relaxed into an easy smile. She was smitten. I could tell. And I prayed she would stay smitten, that my mother would stay charming, that everyone who set foot in this house would fall under her spell – fall in love with her – and fucking help me.
My mother glanced at the pile of DVDs, kind of threw her head back to the extent she could throw her head back.
“Do you like old movies?” The night nurse asked.
My mother beamed. “The Maltese Falcon is only the greatest screenplay ever written.”
I sat down next to her hospice bed, showed her the calendar so far. Leslie would fly in tomorrow evening. Matea, the night nurse, would be here every night at least through the week. Others would come soon. So many people loved her. So many people wanted to come.
My mother stared at me. “You’re not going to leave me again, are you, Tiniest?”
The last blue light of evening through the window.
“I won’t be here all the time,” I admitted. “I’m going to keep my rental. But you’ll never be alone. We’re making sure you’ll never be alone.”
My mother nodded. “Okay.” She sounded afraid. “I don’t want to be a burden.” She’d never seemed to mind causing a cyclone of chaos, but there was no glamour in burden. “I should have just blown my brains out,” she whispered, too quiet for the nurse-women to hear.
As they arranged pills and pains patches, I ducked into the kitchen to put on a pot of water for tea.
Matea appeared next to me. “Your mother,” she said. “She’s Frida Kahlo.”
My heart swelled with hope. Yes. Please let my mother stay charming. “She’d be flattered that you think so,” I said. “She’s certainly a big Frida fan.”
Just then my phone buzzed in my pocket. A text from the chef: Do you need me to kill your mother yet?
I texted back: Not yet.
She texted again: Have you eaten?
I tried to remember. Had I eaten? I hadn’t eaten anything that day. Had I eaten anything the day before? I didn’t think so. But the hunger was growing on me. I liked the odd comfort of this empty feeling. I didn’t know if I wanted to eat. But I knew I wanted the chef.
She was flying to Connecticut in a couple of days to clean out her dad’s apartment, to take care of his “affairs,” as they say.
I texted back: Meet you in an hour?
The ridiculousness of it wasn’t lost on me. The mother/ daughter/caregiver who couldn’t feed herself.
My mother slept, the low hiss of her oxygen machine.
The palliative care nurse gathered her things to leave. “Everything’s going to be all right, darling,” she said to me.
Matea would call my cell with any news.
I wrote her a check for six hundred dollars for the first three nights, couldn’t stop saying “thank you.”
I packed up Maxito and his pirate Legos, headed over to Sol’s place to leave him for the night. “Is Nonna sick?” he wanted to know. He hadn’t seen her, had been playing in the living room, but he was learning to overhear things now.
“Yes, baby,” I said. “She’s sick. She might die.”
Maxito nodded, serious. “One of my chickens died.”
“Yes. That was sad.”
And he nodded again. “That was so sad.”
The chef texted: Pot stickers at Yummy Café? Or I could cook for you here.
I felt needy. Uncomfortable in my neediness. It had been exactly one month since her father’s death and the chef was worrying about what to feed me. But it struck me as maybe part of my damage, too, the way I dreaded being considered. Maybe I would try an experiment: I would proceed as if being a little bit needy wasn’t the worst thing.
If waiting for love wasn’t love, maybe love was something different all together than that complicated/elusive thing I’d been trained to wait for. Maybe it was simpler, too. Just some small thing we could use. Like a broken piece of glass, some string. Like an order of pot stickers late at night. Like vegetable broth with bok choi at Yummy Café.
Like a kiss in the chef’s gravel driveway and “do you want to come in?”
Like the truth that her question had no double meaning. I could say yes or no without unforeseen consequences.
Like a book of matches.
Like a salted caramel in her palm.