Betty will be number eight on the list; she can waive entry three times before she is taken off the list. Before she actually enters, she will have to undergo an assessment designed to test her level of self-sufficiency and “cognitive functioning.” The application fee is a nonrefundable thousand dollars, which I do not tell my mother about.
As I turn the corner to do the paperwork, I catch sight of Betty. When she thinks no one is looking, she reaches out for another flower and yanks the brown top off with force. The sun makes her wrinkles stand out. When I return to her side, she says again, “I want to go home.” She rests her hand on mine just for a second. “Please, George,” she says. “Please.”
“Mother, you’ve been so lucky,” I tell her.
“Oh, you think so?” she asks, her tone implying that there are things I will never know, things she did for me that I cannot fathom.
I think Betty will never live at Tiger Place. She is falling too fast. Soon, I am afraid, she will be beyond movies with popcorn or exercise bicycles, though maybe she will remember flowers. Maybe she will find herself, on some future morning, running her finger along the glass of a painting in a hall she does not recognize, recalling in some corner of her mind the fat buds of her mother’s roses growing in her old front yard. On Facebook, a lady wrote that the days she gets to be with those she loves are “gold-star days.” I often tell Betty that these are our gold-star days. I have tried to make them special so she can carry pieces of these times in her memory. I am trying to pack her bag with things that might draw her back to herself someday.
I wonder if she will remember the cinnamon toast I make on Friday mornings. I wonder if she will recall Mammy washing her hair in rainwater from an old tin pan.
. . .
All the way home from Columbia, I break the speed limit. I want to check on the dog. I want to put an end to this day. My mother is mostly silent. She can no longer deny what is happening and she is plotting, planning her attack. As we travel, Betty’s mood shifts. Suddenly, she is nice, so nice, too nice. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. She asks me if I need money. I turn the radio up. It is Reverend Lucius Love’s gospel hour. I need some lifting up.
When I was in high school, a man named Harold Long preached at the AME church, across the tracks from the white part of town, even then. One of his sisters, whose first name I wish I could remember, was in my mixed chorus class. She was big; her feet bulged out below the straps of her shoes. Stepping up on the bleachers winded her. But I always listened for her. There were all our voices singing together, and there was her voice, full of church, and the people she had come from, and feeling. Her emotion changed the face of an ordinary day and I was drawn by it. Now there are only two black students at Paris High School, both mixed race. The others attend a school called Faith Walk run by one of the African American churches. “I don’t know if it’s segregation,” says a friend, “or if it’s more a matter of the black parents not wanting their kids around the shit the white kids are pulling.”
If there was ever a time when I was convinced there was a God in the universe holding out his hand to me, it was when the Long sisters performed “I Believe.”
“If you stayed in Paris, you could keep that dog,” Betty declares suddenly, eyes glinting as if she has just been dealt a winning hand at the bridge table. She is playing for freedom. I have always enjoyed watching my mother in action. There is love and there is survival. At the moment, the latter can be her only concern. She will do whatever is necessary. Her independence is at stake. Her everything. Home.
I don’t want to take away her home.
“Can’t we just go on the way we are, just a little while longer?” she asks. “It won’t be forever.”
“You look pretty healthy.”
“I could die tomorrow.”
“I told you to get a flu shot.”
The ensuing moments do not fly by.
“Mother, can’t you see that I am trying to do everything I can to make you happy? Trust me, please. I’ll take care of you. I will do right by you.”
“I know,” she says. “I know.” And I think she actually believes it, that I can do it, that I can make it, somehow, okay. Outside it is so hot that steam is rising from the highway. When I was in high school, I brought Mammy, very old then and not far from her death, home from the doctor in Columbia on an old country road. Her eyes never left the window; it seemed as though she was watching something, though she could barely see. Whatever it was, it pleased her. Finally, outside Centralia, she spoke. “Look at all those pretty cows,” said my grandmother, the old woman who still remembered the farm. The blades of the windmills still turned slowly in the breeze off the fields in her mind’s eye.
“Look at those little calves,” she said, directing my attention to the window. But the pastures we were passing were empty. There was nothing there but the strip of highway running toward Paris and the room at Monroe Manor where she lived by then.
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