She carries it for me as we walk back inside and step into the elevator. “My advice,” she says before she leaves, “if I’m in a position to give it. Start brainstorming stuff. Just write shit down without thinking about it. Plug in as many details as you can. You’ll be surprised how little things turn into big things. Okay? Just try. It’s like exercising.”
I stare at the MacBook sitting on my bedside table, a lump in my throat. It’s a sweet, honest gift. I can’t remember the last time someone bought me an actual present.
“I will try,” I say.
—
They give me a release date of two weeks into October, not so much because I’m ready to be out on my own but because, after almost two months, the insurance is running out. Dr. Weston manages to tell me this with a straight face. “It’s not the best of circumstances,” he says. “But you’re ready for outpatient work now. It’s as good a time as any.”
Now that I will be shifting to “outpatient status,” I figure I should finally call home.
Without letting myself stop to reconsider, I pick up my room phone and dial the 606 area code. It’s the speediest physical thing I’ve done in weeks. My body remembers the number to my mother’s house in Kentucky better than it remembers how to hold a pencil.
Mom picks up on the third ring. “Hello?”
Let me give you an idea of the way my mother talks: When she says washrag, it comes out warshrag. The name Kent is two syllables: Kee-yent. And she is loud. She is very loud.
“Hey,” I say slowly. “It’s me.”
“Well, hey yourself,” she says, with only a slight lilt of surprise. “Been wondering where you’ve been at.”
There have been times, in the past couple of years, when I let myself lapse, phone calls to home spaced a month, six weeks apart. But each time Mom picks up to learn that it’s me, it’s this same mild voice, as if I’m calling from the dentist to remind her of her yearly cleaning.
I take a deep breath. “How are you, Mom?”
“Oh, tolerable. Been having some bad storms down here. Sump pump broke again.”
“Sorry. That sucks.”
“Well, we’re making do. You know.” I picture her holding something—a strainer, a cigarette—that she has to put down so she can lean over the breakfast bar in the kitchen, by the phone jack. “I expect we’ll manage. Y’all getting some of this stuff up where you’re at?”
“I’m not in New York,” I say. “I have something to tell you. And I am going to say it all at once. Okay?”
Silence. Too glib for her taste. “Uh, okay.”
“I’m in a hospital in Florida. I had a stroke. I’ve been here about two months.”
More silence. “Well, how’d that happen?” There’s a note of accusation here, a high tone on the word that, the happen low and knowing.
“It was an aneurysm. It broke. There was bleeding.”
“Aneurysm,” she says. It’s half a question.
I heave a sigh. “Yes. Aneurysm.”
“Well. You all right?”
I put my head in my hand. “Yes. I’m in the hospital.”
“Why Florida?”
“That’s where we were when it happened. We were working.”
“Florida,” she says thoughtfully. There’s a lull of a few seconds. Talking to Mom feels like jogging with an intentionally slow partner. Every few strides, I have to run in place and wait, or go back for her. Yet it’s clear: This effect is my fault. She feels the imposition. “Iddint that where your friend’s from?”
“Yeah. We were here for work. She’s with me.”
“Huh. That’s good.” I hear a lighter click. Mom was once a Newport woman but has, in recent years, switched to Dorals. I close my eyes and see her Toyota Tercel, littered with green-and-white foil packages in various states of fullness. “Well. I’m glad you’re all right. That musta scared you. Scares me.”
“I’m okay.”
“Well, if you’re lookin for me to get down there, I don’t think I can until next week or so. They’re workin me pretty hard up to the cleaner’s.”
“That’s okay,” I say. “I have good news, too. We got this fell—fell.” I start over. “A big arts grant. We get to make another movie.”
In the middle of a fight once, my mother told me that I was the only member of the family harebrained enough to get a scholarship to a big fancy school and then waste it by “drawing pictures all day.”
“Congratulations,” she says mildly.
“Thanks. You sound so happy. I love how proud of me you are.”
“Now, don’t start with that shit. Just quit right now.” There’s a thud, a sharp intake of breath. She cusses. Says, “Hold on.”
“Mom—”
“I said hold on, dammit.”
There are bangs, then a muffled, feminine voice behind her. My sister, Shauna. She and her husband and kids live next door to our mother—same holler, nooks one alongside the other accessible by the same road. A thick grove of pines and brambles on a slope separates the two properties. Shauna’s kids used to scramble over the rise until last summer, when my nephew was bitten by a copperhead and had to be rushed to the emergency room.
Mom and Shauna have a soft back-and-forth. The diphthongs give me goosebumps. “Sa-yed. Nah-owh.” The broadness of the word time. Sounds I didn’t realize I’d forgotten. I tear up and feel like an idiot.
Mom’s back. “You wanna talk to your sister?”
I do not want to talk to my sister. “Well, I don’t want to—”