I moved his rug near my bed, stroking his head. I watched him turn around in a circle three times before committing to a sleeping position. I listened as he snored through the night, occasionally kicking a bit.
The next morning, I took him out, despite his strong resistance, but stumbled. A stick cracked under my foot as, off balance, I loosened my grip on the leash, and Raj reared up, tore the thing from my hand, and bolted.
It wasn’t light yet; he was just gone. I hadn’t taken in how scared he was. I just hadn’t paid enough attention. I whistled and whistled, drove around, looking for his orange collar. I went down to the woods, searched as best I could, emerging with my glasses broken but nothing else.
“The thing about dogs,” Betty said, “is they always break your heart.”
Early the next morning, I heard a single, solitary “woof.” Out back, our neighbor held Raj in his arms, the leash still dragging from his collar. All day, we celebrated. A friend from Vermont confessed that her father had been a dog trainer and that she grew up eating dog biscuits.
Carol confided that Betty had instructed her to find another dog, another Lab, to appear on Christmas. This just didn’t seem like my mother. Later, coming back from the bathroom, I heard Betty, alone in the room, talking to Raj.
“You are a bad dog,” she said. “You upset my boy. Now don’t wet on me.”
. . .
After the kidney procedure, my mother’s urologist was a kind voice on the phone in the white hallway filled with light. The cancer floor, recently redone, was plush. I expected to see Jennifer Lopez outside drinking a Cuba Libre by a swimming pool.
The urologist told me that Betty had no tumor or stone. Her kidney was being cut off by some sort of growth, but they had saved the organ with a stent.
Betty came back to the room gray, the gray of the ocean in South Carolina, the gray of my father’s face during his last days. “Where’s the dog?” she asked groggily. “Is the dog here? Who is tending to the dog?”
“There’s a big black nose sticking up here,” Betty always says when Raj turns up begging at the table. “Mister, I’ll skin you alive.”
All morning the room was gray, like Betty, as if invaded by fog, and now and again my mother rose up out of the haze to say she was thirsty. I brought in more sherbet she liked, grateful for the color, the only bright thing in the room. Lying there, Betty reminded me of her aunt Bess, a little woman. It seemed my mother’s body had dwindled overnight.
. . .
Betty was tall; Bess was small. When walking together on sunny days, they cast shadows suggesting mother and child or partners in comedy from some silent movie. Bess’s waves of hair never lay quite right. As she lingered at store windows, Betty stood behind her, smoothing her hair down with the kind of care she usually had no time for.
“I will take care of Bess,” Betty told Mammy and my uncles when they wanted Bess to go to a nursing home. “Just don’t you worry about it.”
I told myself I would take care of Betty. Over and over, I told myself I would see her through.
I would make it go just right. I would take her home, sit on the edge of the bed, and tell her funny stories about people we loathe.
I would be her soldier.
“You can do this,” said a friend on the phone.
“I know.”
That afternoon, on my way to purchase an extremely large cinnamon roll, I spotted a large woman from church in the hall. Betty glared at me. “Did you tell her I was in here?”
“No.”
“Well, you talk to her. I’m going to shut my eyes. Tell her I died.”
I hid in the men’s room and ate my cinnamon roll.
. . .
The doctors began to speak of lymphoma. That night, the pain pills nauseated Betty’s empty stomach. I watched the lights on I-70 from her window and worried about Raj. “You’ve been so good to me,” Betty said to Cinda, who answered, “Well, George is the one who got you here.”
Betty said nothing. I pretended not to notice.
That night at home, quite late, I made spareribs with barbecue sauce, Betty’s favorites, as Raj watched, hoping for a treat. He has food addiction issues.
I had somehow convinced myself that we would have a little party after Betty’s tests, when she could eat. I saw myself arriving, her savior with Tupperware, sauce still on my fingers. When I went to my mother’s room to search for a fresh bottle of eyedrops to take to the hospital, I found the program from my father’s funeral under her pillow along with all her lists of all the words.