James sometimes longed for isolation, to live off the land, to hear rain even as it slow-dripped from petals, and song birds, their many trills one vast song. If not silence, then that kind of beautiful sound. He had been raised with an older sister and a younger one, both talkative and dramatic, and sharing the same father, whom James’ mother had married twice. His own father, a deep voiced man, greatly loved by James the baby, had declined to support his son, just as the other father had done. The mother wasn’t the kind of woman to pursue support. James had often said to himself and to his sisters that they would have been better off had she not pursued men. He didn’t mean she had been promiscuous, but she hadn’t used sound judgment, and had no pride.
Once a week James visited his mother, providing as he always had traditional male strengths—handywork for those projects within his scope, locating reputable workers for those without. Lifting, planting, catching in a live trap and transporting elsewhere. His sisters, who each lived about an hour away, visited regularly and managed more domestic duties such as stocking groceries, writing checks for utilities, shampooing hair, and, in a rare mood, painting his mother’s fingernails, which she had never done in her prime. Eighty years old now, she relinquished more of herself to her children’s care and they had discovered they weren’t totally in agreement, not about who she was, who she had been, or what she needed and wanted. They agreed she didn’t want to be in a nursing home. She had stated she would rather live in a wagon attached to one of their cars than in a nursing home. She signed a living will at their request, and a directive. She made Cora, the older sister, swear that if she, the mother, wanted to starve herself to death, Cora would fight for that right. Only the younger sister, Ruth, had a home large enough to allow their mother a place almost her own—a full basement, where a kitchen could be added. Ruth had never known the truly young mother the other two described.
James felt that as the son he should be the one who provided a home for his mother. He couldn’t. He and his wife had a tiny house, a showcase of sorts, since his wife loved beautiful things, kept them spotless, and traded up always. They had a good marriage, children and grandchildren, but his wife did not like the mother-in-law who made, she said, “mean and snide comments.” James understood the comments were probably bluntly true and therefore all the meaner. He had been reared with such truths around him.
James’ phone, on the round table beside his recliner, buzzed and trembled, displaying his mother’s number. He hesitated, having planned to read a little, maybe doze off. He often slept in the chair, because his legs hurt if he lay flat on a bed. War wounds. He punched “accept.”
He heard a faint murmur that included his name. “Mom? What’s wrong?” He struggled to get out of the chair, phone still to his ear. “I’m on my way.”
He hurried to find his wife, advise her where and why he was headed, then took her car, agitated and unable to calm himself. He had so many grievances against his mother, and yet, he didn’t want her sick or hurt. He wanted her to continue until he was at peace with who she was. She had allowed them all to struggle because of her own needy heart.
He sped the six miles north, through the little factory town to its outer limit, pulled onto the dirt strip between her yard and the street, and ran down her walk, up the porch. He forced the door open, breaking the little slide bolt, and was quickly inside. He found her lying on the bedroom floor, the land-line phone next to her. He lifted her. She was so light, he could have been holding only her clothing. He carried her to the living room, lowered her to the sofa, careful to keep her head propped by the two small cushions always there. Her back was so crooked she couldn’t lie flat without choking. He called for an ambulance and left her alone only long enough to locate her purse and make sure her wallet and cards were inside.
When the emergency men moved her to the gurney, he had the pillows for them, and the biggest man, who had been tender with her, maneuvered them into place.
James followed the ambulance. Holding the steering wheel with both hands and shifting his phone between the two, he connected with his wife. She seemed truly concerned, and he was grateful. All the headlights of night traffic and the moonlight streamed at times like a kaleidoscope and he had to concentrate on the vehicle before him and nothing else.
When they wheeled her into the building, the form strapped under the yellow covering appeared childlike, diminutive, with red and white curls. Closer, he saw his mother, jaws slack, eyes slits of blue. “You’re okay,” he said. “We got you here. I’ll stay.”
He followed the gurney but veered to the reception window while the attendants took his mother on to the back, the door closing between them. He sat down like a patient and found her insurance cards in the first slots of her billfold. Other necessary information he knew—address, birthdate, age. To his knowledge she hadn’t seen a doctor in over ten years, perhaps much longer. Could it have been twenty?
Waiting in the lobby, he avoided looking directly at the two people also waiting, a young woman with pierced ears and a nose ring, who curled in a chair and clutched her phone close. A man about his own age, bald except for a thin white fringe, and with Bandaid-like patches on his forearms. “I got these patches all over my body,” he announced, drawing eye contact. “I’ve been losing muscle strength and they can’t tell why. I can barely handle my truck.”
“Bad deal.”
“I’ve had x-rays, MRI, seen specialists, everything. Nothing.”
“Sometimes that happens. Were you in Nam?”
“Nope.”
“New stuff floating around all the time. None of us is actually safe.”
“You got that.”
Talking trivialized why he was there. He kept his eyes down and when the fellow said, “I haven’t got anybody to help me. My wife died,” he just glanced up and nodded, then dropped his head again, staring at his hands and thinking of his mother.
When they finally called him back, she’d had what tests they were going to run, and he had only to wait for a doctor or nurse to come in with information.
“I may have to stay,” she whispered.
He wanted to wipe away the saliva gathering at the corners of her mouth but he thought that might insult her. She would sometimes slap at a helping but unneeded hand. In a few seconds, he got up, took a tissue from the metal box, and bending over her dotted the tissue around her lips. “You sleep,” he said.
Signs of his mother’s life pulsed in the electronic monitor above her bed—breathing, heartbeat, blood pressure. Everything in her little body was slow and easy. She had ever been a calm woman except for brief flare-ups well warranted by some situation. He found her clothing in a white plastic bag lying on a chair. Something silvery shone in the dark slacks, and he tugged part of them out. A safety pin. The waistband had been tightened. He checked the full waistband. Pinned on both sides. How much weight had she lost? He was embarrassed. Her shoes were on the other side of the bed, heels worn down on the outer side, false leather scuffed and stretched. They looked as if they’d been soaked and dried. He returned them to the floor. They were the kind sold at the big chain stores in little towns, to people trapped in one way or the other.
He recalled her last time driving. She had plowed into the garbage cans in front of her house on pickup day. She had phoned him. “You can sell my car if you want and keep the cash for you kids. I’m quitting driving today, before I hit something live.” And so she had.
The doctor came in, a military type in build and stance, but apparently genuinely concerned about the woman in the bed.
“Your mother is remarkable. Not a broken bone, no cranial bleeding, no bad bleed anywhere. But she’s rattled on the inside, too, and we want to keep her for tonight. With that back as it is and her internal organs rather compressed, we’ll want to see everything’s working as it should before we send her home.”
She was listening and had a wise, sort of I-told-you-so look, an old crone being a little self-righteous and humorous. “I don’t mind staying here tonight,” she said, “if you or one of the girls could come get me tomorrow.”
He hadn’t phoned his sisters yet. He didn’t know why. They’d zip down and worry and quarrel but they’d take control. He’d be able to go on home to his wife and leave the close caretaking to them. He didn’t want to. He wanted to sit by her bedside. “I plan to stay, too,” he said.
“Don’t. You’ll make your wife worry and that’ll keep me awake. Go home where you’re supposed to be.”
He couldn’t tell if she meant it or not. He wanted her to clue him what she really needed. He probed the doctor’s expression for any doubt or hang-around message, but clearly he was good to go and should.
His wife was eager for every detail now or predictable.
“She’s not really hurt at all,” he insisted. “She’s a tough woman. I don’t know how she made it from the living room to the bedroom. Crawled, I guess.”
“Are you wanting to bring her here? I wouldn’t mind for a while.”
“Thank you. I don’t think that’ll be necessary. I have to fix her door tomorrow, though, since I broke the bolt to get to her.”
“Okay.”
“And I’ll pick her up and get her settled in.”
“All right.”
He was seated at their kitchen table, her standing next to him. She rubbed his shoulder as she did when he was distressed, and stood even closer for a few minutes. Then she went in to the phone. “Did you call your sisters?”
“Not yet. But let me handle it.”
“Okay.”
He didn’t call them. In the morning, he left his wife a reminder about his plans and drove north to the little factory town where his mother lived and where he and his sisters had been raised. He passed close enough to hear the factory whistle at 7:15, though it was a different setup now, air conditioned, unionized. In the house, he fetched his mother’s tool kit from the laundry room, and removed the old lock, scraped the wood. He found her patch-up can of paint under the sink with a couple brushes, one of them an art brush for little nicks. She had her own methods of repair. He couldn’t buy a new bolt until the stores opened, so he went through her house, looking for signs of disability, a wandering mind. The furniture was a bit dusty. The small closets were overly full but the clothes were in an ordered grouping. The rough shelving which he had added to the closets held boxes of photos and other small memorabilia. The bedspreads were the old-fashioned kind that had to be tucked under pillows and evenly draped down the sides. No comforters and massive pillows. Plain, serviceable. Pretty enough.
His room was off the hall, a step down. As a kid, he had loved it, a place all his own. A door he could lock. He could store anything he wanted. He just had to make his bed every day. He had believed his mother to be the most beautiful woman in the whole town. When she sang, he would sit on his bed just glorying in pride and love. As he grew up, he lost pride in the place, in his own singularity, and in his mother. She could have done better by them if she hadn’t had to have a man in her life. And not good men. He and she had discussed the possible original look of the old house and had decided the laundry room/bathroom had been a long porch on the original house or maybe a kind of stable. That had troubled him which made no reasonable sense, but created an ache. If she died, the place would have to be razed. He didn’t want that ever to happen. Memories need a place.
He remembered the crumple of her on the bedroom floor, the safety pins in her slacks. He had to get outside and storm the outside world for a bolt. Another little bolt that he could break any time he had to.
When he called the hospital to make sure he could bring her home, he advised the nurse not to dress her. He would bring a change of clothes for her. Then he went through his mother’s closet and selected a clean housedress he had seen her wear when he visited, a loose garment, with a waist pull-cord, allowing her to adjust for her humped back. He found the flat blue slippers she wore with that dress. He hated to look for undergarments, but he did so, and took a couple cotton panties without paying much attention. He might have to do more someday.
A nurse helped her into the clean clothes while he waited outside. Then the nurse went over the checkout pages, holding them halfway between his mother, in a wheelchair, and him.
“I don’t mind you telling us both,” his mother said to the nurse. “But I can understand it. I can also read.”
“It’s just a precaution because you’re on some medication and may not remember.”
“I probably will,” his mother said. “But it’s all right. You do what you have to.”
The nurse let his mother take the checkout pages, but spoke to James. “You know your mother hasn’t seen a doctor in fifteen years, if what she told us is correct.”
“It’d be correct.”
“She’s in remarkable health, the doctor said, but she needs to be under regular care of a physician. You must make an appointment for her with someone to follow up this visit. There’s a list of doctors closer to you or here at Cape. They all take Medicare.”
“I’ll see to it.”
“I have two daughters also,” his mother said. She looked at him. “You didn’t call them?”
“Not yet.”
“I thought not, since they’d be here if you had.”
He nodded. “I have reasons.”
“I know you do.”
The nurse handled the wheelchair while he hurried to have the car at the curb before they reached it. The nurse insisted that he stay in the vehicle. She helped his mother, very slowly and carefully, into the passenger seat, and fastened the seat belt.
“The follow-up appointment should be in the next few days.”
He had it. He had it.
As soon as they were away from the hospital grounds, his mother said, “Now I feel like maybe I’m going to live. I was scared for a while they’d do something my body couldn’t tolerate.”
“So was I.”
“I remember you picking me up and carrying me. I knew I was in safe hands and would be all right.”
“Just to the living room. The ambulance people did the rest.”
“I thought you were with me the whole time.”
“I was. But behind the ambulance.”
She smiled, a little crooked, one of her wily-women smiles, not her real smile.
She dozed off and on, but was lucid each time she woke, with continuity to her words. The sunlight swept through the car as if it traveled in smaller pieces, as clouds did. They drove past the old fields, down into flatter land, and then hit the gentler rise into the higher land of their own community.
Outside her house, he parked under the tree at the sidewalk edging the main road. “I’m going to carry you inside, Mom.”
“I’m going to let you.”
He unlocked the door first, and propped the screen door open with one of her porch chairs. When he went back to the car, she had managed to get the door open and to push her dress skirt tight against her so he could lift her easily. She clutched the bag holding her other clothing close.
“You can leave that bag. I’ll get it in a minute.”
“Let’s do it in one trip.”
“I’ll have to come back to shut the car door.”
In a few seconds, she set the bag aside.
He slipped one arm under her thighs and the other along her back waist. She leaned into him, the slightest weight he’d ever held and the dearest. “Where should I take you, Mom? To the bedroom? Bathroom? Living room?”
“Living room.”
He set her easily in her recliner, adjusted the footrest. “What now? Want some water or coffee?”
“I’m fine. I’m pretty sure I can take care of myself, but I admit, I’m very sore. All over sore. And very tired.”
“So I’ll stay here with you. I’ve already told June I might stay here. I’ll get some of my things after a while.”
She tilted her head back to meet his eyes, so he sat down on the brown sofa to save her that strain. He hated that she had to be so humpbacked after everything else, too hard a life.
“Let me rest a few minutes, and we can talk about it. Just a few minutes.” Her eyes were already closing.
He sat silently, watched her sink into sleep. One day it wouldn’t be sleep.
The room was always too dark. She tended to leave curtains closed in the front part of the house, where people from the street might look in, but she opened the kitchen curtains always, first thing in the morning and all day. Even when she was working in the factory, they’d be open. He and his sisters and his aunts knew where the key was—she wanted her house open to family. She’d be there soon. When he came to mow her lawn or do a patch of something, she had a simple cake ready, coffee ready. They’d talk about the strangest things. Squirrels. Rose bushes. A gun his grandfather had. A few details about his father anytime he asked. She answered any question he asked and some he didn’t.
James fixed coffee, because she drank it any time of day. He made her a grilled cheese sandwich and put a generous serving of applesauce in a small bowl. She kept a tray on the sideboard, pale blue with a painted border of tiny yellow flowers. He arranged the dishes on the tray, covering the cup with a saucer to keep the coffee warm, and placing a folded napkin to the left. He set the prepared tray on the coffee table for when she woke.
James knew she would advise him to call his sisters, and he would do so soon, maybe this evening. He needed more time alone with her, this woman who had been both mother and father to him. He was learning how very much he loved her, and he wanted to let her know.
R. M. Kinder is the author of three collections of short fiction, A Common Person and Other Stories , (Richard Sullivan Award University of Notre Dame 2021), A Near Perfect Gift (U of Michigan Literary Fiction Award 2005), and Sweet Angel Band (Helicon Nine Willa Cather Award 1991); two novels, An Absolute Gentleman (Counterpoint 2007), and The Universe Playing Strings (U of N Mexico P 2016). She is co-author of Old Time Fiddling: Hal Sappington, Missouri Fiddler (Johnson County Missouri Historical Society). Her stories and poems have appeared in Chariton Review, Descant, Southern Humanity Review, Arts and Letters, and similar publications.