what? She's not."
"She's not?"
"No, this morning. She told me that she always knew who I was, always knew what I was, and that she has always loved me, just the way I am."
"Did you card her? There's an impostor in our mom's bed."
"Shut up, it was nice. Important."
"She was probably just saying that because she's dying."
"She did say that she wished I wouldn't wear men's suits all the time."
"She's not alone on that one," Charlie said.
Jane fell back into assault mode. "I'm off on the floss mission. Call Cassandra."
"Done," Charlie said.
"And Buddy needs a doughnut." Jane threw open the door and ran out into the heat screaming like a berserker charging the enemy.
Charlie closed the door behind her so as not to let the air-conditioning out, and watched through the glass as his sister ran across the zero-scaped yard like she was on fire. He looked beyond her to the red rock mesa rising out of the desert. There seemed to be a deep crevasse in it that he hadn't seen there before. He looked again, and saw that it wasn't a crevasse at all, just a long, sharp shadow.
Then he ran out into the driveway and looked at the position of the sun, then at the shadow. It was on the wrong side of the mesa. There couldn't be a shadow on this side - the sun was also on this side. He shaded his eyes and watched the shadow until he thought his brains were cooking in the sun. It was moving, slowly, but moving, and not the way a shadow moves. It was moving with purpose, against the sun, toward his mother's house.
"My date book," he said to himself. "Oh, shit."
Chapter 18
18
YO MOMMA SO DEAD THAT...
On her last day, Lois Asher rallied. After not having even been able to get up to go to the breakfast table, or into the living room to sit and watch TV for three weeks, got up and danced with Buddy to an old Ink Spots song. She was playful and full of laughter, she teased her children and hugged them, she ate a chocolate-marshmallow sundae, and she brushed and flossed afterward. She put on her favorite silver jewelry and wore it to the dinner table, and when she couldn't find her squash-blossom necklace she shrugged it off like it was a minor thing - she must have misplaced it. Oh, well.
Charlie knew what was happening because he had seen it before, and Buddy and Jane knew because Grace, the hospice nurse, explained it to them. "It happens again and again. I've seen people come out of a coma and sing their favorite songs, and all I can tell you is to enjoy it. People see the light come back into eyes that have been dull for months, and they start to place hope on it. It's not a sign of getting well, it's an opportunity to say good-bye. It's a gift."
Charlie had also learned by observing that it really helped everyone to let go if they were at least mildly medicated, so he and Jane took some antianxiety pills that Jane's therapist had prescribed and Buddy washed down a time-released morphine pill with some scotch. Medication and forgiveness can make for joyous moments with the dying - it's like they get to return to childhood - and because nothing in the future matters, because you don't have to train them for life, teach lessons, forge applicable and practical memories, all the joy can be wicked from those last moments and stored in the heart. It was the best and closest time Charlie had ever had with his mother and his sister, and Buddy, in the sharing, became family as well.
Lois Asher went to bed at nine and died at midnight.
I can't stay for the funeral," Charlie said to his sister the next morning.
"What do you mean you can't stay for the funeral?"
Charlie looked out the window at the giant ice pick of a shadow that had made its way down the mountain toward his mother's house. Charlie could see it churning at the edges, like flocks of birds or swarming insects. The point was less than a half mile away.
"I have something I have to do at home, Jane. I mean, I forgot to do it and I really, really can't stay."
"Don't be mysterious. What the hell do you need to do that you can't attend your own mother's funeral?"
Charlie was pressing his Beta Male imagination to the breaking point to