“Thanks for the rescue,” I said to Dad when she was out of earshot.
He did not return my smile. “Phee has been very generous to us. To you,” he said. “You might try to have more sympathy for her.”
“I do try,” I protested. “She’s always criticizing me.”
“Because she doesn’t want to see you repeating her mistakes.”
“You mean, staying in Bunyan all my life?” I asked flippantly.
“That’s unworthy of you both. You and Phee have a lot in common. You both care deeply about family. You have strong minds. Strong wills.” My father leveled a mild look at me. “And you both sometimes speak without considering the full impact of your words on the people you care about.”
My face flushed. I’d always joked that Aunt Phee had no heart. But maybe she hid her heart because she felt things deeply. Because she refused to appear vulnerable. Had my rejection of her dinner invitation, my rudeness over the years, actually hurt her?
But she kept inviting me. She kept showing up.
Another lesson there. Or being home, going to church, was messing with my head.
My mother’s eyes were closed, her face shrunken and naked. Her faded hair straggled flat across her forehead, squashed of vitality. Only her chest moved, up and down, her breathing slow and sonorous.
“Why is she breathing like that?” I asked the aide who had accompanied me to her room.
Keisha,her badge said. She stood by my mother’s bedside, taking her pulse. My mother’s wrist looked thin and light in her hand, like the bones of a bird.
When Granny died, all us girls went to the visitation. I remember our mother protesting that a funeral parlor was no place for little children, but in her grief over her mother’s death, she was overruled. Anyway, there was nobody to watch us. Everybody in town was there to see my grandmother laid out and pay their respects to the family.
Meg moved with twelve-year-old dignity through clusters of our neighbors, taking care to keep Amy away from the open casket at thefront of the room. Not that our little sister could see over the sides of the coffin. Beth was hiding under the white-skirted table that held the guest book. But I marched right up and looked in, curious and unafraid. I loved my grandmother, who never cared if I got dirty and always smelled comfortingly like her kitchen. Besides, I’d never seen a dead person before.
She looked... wrong. Not like Granny at all. I recognized her Sunday dress, her gold earrings. But her face was a funny color, like an old peach crayon, and a rotten sweet smell hung over her like dying flowers.
I’d wanted to throw up.
I wasn’t going to throw up now. But my stomach churned with the same sense ofwrongness. The shock. Where was my mother?
“It’s the drugs,” the aide said. “That fentanyl patch is helping with the pain, but it does make her drowsy.” Keisha leaned over my mother’s pillow. “Abby, you have a visitor, hon. Your daughter’s here to see you.”
“Oh, don’t wake her,” I protested.
“It’s all right,” Keisha said. “It’s time for her lunch tray.”
“Not hungry,” my mother mumbled. And then, “Meg?”
I swallowed hard. “It’s Jo, Momma.”
“I have to listen to your heart now, Abby,” Keisha said. “Then you and your daughter can have a nice visit.”
My mother nodded obediently, like a child. I stood back as Keisha moved the stethoscope over my mother’s thin chest.
“Still beating,” my mother joked when the aide was done.
Keisha smiled. “Yes, your heart is good and strong. Do you think you can sit up now?”
My mother pressed her lips together. Nodded. A grimace flickered across her face as the aide raised the head of her hospital bed. I winced in sympathy.
“Thank you.” My mother shifted, trying to get comfortable. “I think... A pill?”
“It’s not time yet, hon. After lunch, when I come in with the IV,okay?” Keisha looked at me. “You see if you can get her to eat something.”
It felt rude—wrong—talking over my mother’s head, as if she wasn’t there. “I brought biscuits,” I said.
