She made me fish, play football. She took me to endless lessons, dentists for braces, the dermatologist for antiacne pills, St. Louis for clothes. She made certain I ate the proper foods. For years and years, if I was leaving to go back to the city on an early-morning flight, she always got up at 4 or 5 a.m. to prepare steak and eggs, cinnamon toast, to stuff my suitcases with special treats, the things I liked best that only home could offer. She did everything, everything she believed she was supposed to do. Now she can do none of that. This clearly grieves her, I see. When I leave for a plane now, she says, “I feel so terrible. I cannot offer you anything to take. I should have made you something nice.” She worries that after she dies, I—a man alone—will go untended.
I have tried my best to show her I am okay. I have done everything I know to show her she did all right with me. I have told her. I have reminded her of all the things she did, said time and again that whatever happens, I will never forget the things she has done for me. But it has never quite seemed to sink in.
For years I have tried to tell her that she has been just the mother I wanted, that I am the one who made my own mistakes, that I am not broken at all, that I am just human. But I don’t think she has ever believed it. This is why, I think, she cannot speak of my life, because she somehow got it all wrong from the beginning. Or so she believes. This is why she has stayed, why she has waited, watching out the window, always looking out for the moment when I will turn into the driveway, always trying to look her best for when I come in the door. She has struggled to keep on, trying not to fall. To try to help me. She has not wanted to leave me alone. She has always wanted to be here for me, to do what she could.
. . .
We stand at the window. We see the rain falling on the yards, gardens, and flowers. I imagine it coming down on the beans that may bloom now on their twisted vines, on the burned corn, and highways, and back roads, and little white houses. It is raining on the trees and on the graves where, years after my father died, Betty and John struggled, summer after summer, to make the grass grow.
. . .
Last night, after I returned from my time on the church step, the evening began softly, but changed. Although her face was a battle of frustration and confusion, Betty sat, without agitation or sound, poring over her stack of bills again. I asked to help; she shook her head. When she reached the end of the stack, she started again. This happened over and over. I watched her go through this process until I began to get nervous and interrupted. “Let’s see if there’s a movie,” I said. “Surely there is something on all those channels.” My mother does not much like television, except for the news, but she agreed. On one of the HBO channels, a Richard Gere film was just starting.
“Who is that actor?” she asked.
“Richard Gere.”
After an hour or so, time she spent staring, seemingly not quite comprehending, at the screen, she asked again, “Who is that actor?”
“Richard Gere.”
In an hour, the same question: “Who is that actor?”
“Richard Gere.”
I dozed off in front of the television as she crinkled the newspaper. Richard Gere was running down a city street, pursued by someone. When I looked up, she asked again, “Who is that actor in that movie?”
. . .
I see the rain falling on the deserted church in Perry, and on Madison’s once-lively Main Street. It is coming down in Holiday, and Middle Grove, and Duncans Bridge, Clarence, Monroe City, Mexico, Moberly, Macon, Boonville, De Soto, Washington, Bonne Femme, Brunswick, Santa Fe, Granville, Huntsville, Salisbury, LaPlata, Keytesville, and Higbee. I see the old farmers with wrinkled faces, looking up at the sky.
. . .
Last night she was fitful, pacing around her bed, shaking her head, and getting after herself for something, or so it seemed. She was mad at herself for something. She was angry and so agitated that I knew she would never get to sleep, but I succeeded, finally, in getting her into bed. I fluffed her pillows, and arranged the blanket, and asked if she was too warm or not warm enough. I took her hand to feel if it was cold, then pulled the sheet up to her waist as she stared at the ceiling, shaking, half crying, half laughing, half herself, half gone, half knowing, half not.
As I turned to leave the room, she glanced at me and I saw that she was smiling at me, not the smile of recent days, the smile that seems connected to nothing, but the smile of the real Betty, the one who has not quite left forever.
When I left the room, she would not let me turn out the light. I noticed the card by the bedside table. On it, she had written:
Eggnog
Richard Greer
Anne Wallin
Lisbon
Richard Greer
Eggnog: something she served on holidays when she gathered the family together.
Richard Greer: a stranger running with purpose through her night’s confusing streets.
Anne Wallin, called Nona, was the aunt she lived with in St. Louis during her days as a secretary who rode the streetcar home.
Lisbon, I think, is all the places she wanted to go.
. . .
We stand at the window for the longest time and do not move. I see the rain falling on the dry shores of the Mississippi and the Missouri. I see my mother’s face in the glass with the rain coming down. We are both standing there, behind the glass that separates us from the world. The fragments of our faces are there in the glass, partly there, partly not. There have been so many Bettys. But I think I like this one best, this old lady in the flannel gown and slippers. She tries so hard.