‘Moroccan chicken?’ I say, sniffing as I hug her.
‘With prunes,’ she says. ‘Your grandfather hates prunes so I have to get them into him somehow. Otherwise, all we talk about at night are bowel movements and orange fibre drinks.’
I can smell that the dish is far less spicy than usually recommended because spicy food does not agree with anyone in the house except Mum, and she never cooks for herself. Only for other people. She is theadd-on to her own meals. The carer’s lot.
I pull an apron off the hook by the dresser and put it on.
‘Off with you,’ I say. ‘I’m here. I’ll see you at half two.’
Maura and I take over from Mum as often as we can, which is less often than we would like.
‘I’ll just finish—’ she begins.
‘Go,’ I order. ‘I can cook, you know.’
She smiles wearily and hands me the wooden spoon.
Her blonde hair is streaked with grey now, and today, she looks very tired. Rather than the massage we are treating her to and lunch with one of her old school friends, she looks as if she needs to lie down and just sleep.
I am unnerved by this. My mother is a coper. She can do anything –hasdone anything since my father’s stroke, when suddenly, their life fell apart. She was taking care of her mother and she and my father were considering converting the garage into a little bedroom for his father, who was entirely compos mentis but no longer able to really look after himself, when whoosh ... the stroke hit our family.
Strokes do that – hit a family. Not just one person.
One person takes the savagery of the stroke but all around, their family falls into the hole of tragedy, too.
Before the stroke, my father was funny, wildly in love with my mother, considering retirement from his engineering job and discussing with my mother where they would travel.
‘TheTrans-Siberian Railway,’ my father would suggest.
‘You’ll be killed,’ Granny would squeak.
Granny has only been outside of Ireland once, to the Marian shrine at Lourdes. That was enough for her. In Granny Bridget’s eyes, Abroad is a frightening place where you will be taken advantage of and have your money robbed.
This can happen in Ireland,I think grimly.
‘Route 66,’ my mother said.
‘Gone, isn’t it?’ said Granddad Eddie, who wants to be the fount of all knowledge but has moments where he falters because he’s very keen on the information being correct. He’s a stickler for accuracy.
‘We could do ayear-long trip involving rucksacks and Airbnb,’ Dad had said, an arm around my mother, holding her lovingly the way he always did.
‘Lorcan Abalone! Rucksacks indeed,’ Mum burst out laughing. ‘If you think I’m going anywhere with a rucksack, you’ve got another think coming.’
‘How is everyone,’ I ask now.
‘Fine. Your father slept well. He’s calm today. Mum had a dreadful nightmare about going into a wheelchair and she’s still very fretful. Eddie says he wants an allotment.’
I laugh. ‘He hates gardening.’
Mum laughs too and looks like herself for the first time since I’ve arrived.
‘He found a mini seed catalogue in one of the papers and he’s enchanted with it, wants nothing but plants for his birthday.’
‘It was his birthday in March,’ I point out.
‘I mentioned that,’ she says, swiftly putting a few things into the dishwasher, ‘but he feels that at his age, he is entitled to more birthdays than normal people.’
‘Ha! At least he knows he’s not normal.’
