The farm comes into view first, followed by the farmhouse. The driveway is long, dust billowing around my car until Ibump, bumponto the paved section. I pull my car around the circular drive, coming to a stop and putting it in park.
Outside my car, I hop up the stairs like I always have. In the distance, the whinny of a horse. A blue sky as far as the eye can see.
"Dad?" I say, letting myself in the house.
"In here, hon," he yells from the kitchen.
Great. I should probably check to make sure the fire extinguisher is ready to be used, if needed.
"Hi," I say, walking in. My dad stands at the counter, wearing his customary work-roughened jeans, and a Carhartt flannel shirt. On his feet are bright white socks, because my mother is a stickler about shoes in the house. I toe mine off, shucking them in a corner and pushing them under the lower lip of the cabinet.
He looks at me with a ready smile. "Hello, Daisy Mae."
Nobody uses my middle name except him, and he always has. Excluding when he's stern with me, or apologetic. Most of the time he's happy, and fun-loving, and I'm Daisy Mae.
I stop for a hug from him, then keep going to the counter-height kitchen stools and wind my purse over the back of one seat. "Where's Mom?"
"On her way down," he answers, stirring something in a bowl. I can't see what it is, because the bowl isn't one of my mom's glass Pyrex. "Good day today, though."
It's his way of preparing me for how she'll look. How she'll act, in accordance with how she's feeling. I appreciate the heads-up, though it doesn't make any of this better. The fact she's dying, and soon, is inescapable.
"How can I help?" I ask, joining my dad at the counter. Peering into the bowl, I determine it is some kind of potato salad. "Did you make that?"
"Uhh, no." He laughs self-deprecatingly. "I bought a basic potato salad, then added bacon and green onion, and a little bit of Dijon mustard. It's one of your mom's oldest tricks."
Swiping a chunk of potato, I pop it in my mouth and am pleasantly surprised. "This is actually good."
"Your mother calls itupcycling." He frowns. "I think. Or maybe she calls it a hack."
"Either way, you nailed it."
"Is that my darling girl I hear talking?" My mother's voice reaches us before her, and when she does, it's like a punch to the gut. I don't know why it knocks me out emotionally to see her hollow cheekbones, her sunken skin clinging to her chest bones in the scoop neck T-shirt she wears. She looked the same the past few times I've seen her, and she'll continue to be this way. I have to be able to see past it, to not let it decimate me, so I can savor our time together.
"Mama," I trill, floating away from my dad so I can hug her fragile form. "Dad is taking a page out of your personal cookbook."
"Taught him everything I know," she sasses. "Good thing, too, cause I'm dying."
Dad's head drops. His shoulders slump.
Neither of us are willing to ask her why she makes those jokes, or tell her how they make us feel. Her maudlin sense of humor is a recent development, probably a coping mechanism. How can I ask her to stop something that may bring her a brief respite from facing down the end of her life?
"Oh, Mom." A gentle chide is all I manage. "You're getting saucy."
She laughs, walking slowly but with determination to my dad. Like me, she samples a bite from the bowl and declares it right on the money.
A timer dings. Dad grabs a pair of tongs, clacking them together in the air and announcing, "That would be the chicken."
Dad informs me we're eating outside in the screened-in porch. I set the table, coming back to help carry food, when I hear my parents' low voices.
"You should have seen her in my dress, Charles. She was a vision."
"I know, honey. You've said so many times."
"I can't help repeating myself." She sighs. "Do we have to talk to her today?" It's almost a whine.
That's odd. I slow down, lingering.
"We're talking to her now," my dad says gently.
