too, the drag in my heart, my utter weariness at the way we would have to continue to live. There was only so much a canopy could do.
Later I would call Suralee. She would be outraged. In trying to explain my mother’s way of thinking to her, perhaps I would come to understand it better myself.
That night, rummaging around in my closet for shoes that might be good enough to start school with, I found the sheet music for a song my mother had written long ago. It was called “Sugar Bee Tree,” and it had a catchy melody and good lyrics—to my mind, anyway. My mother used to sing it to me when I was little. I sat on the floor, staring at the notes my mother had so carefully penned in, thinking of all the things she might have done if she’d not been stricken with polio. She was so smart; she’d been able to sing and dance, and she’d been a really good artist, too. Even now she sometimes held a paintbrush between her teeth to do little still lifes, and once she’d painted a beribboned bouquet on a glass for me. It sat on my dresser top now, half filled with pennies.
I dusted off the sheet music and sang a line near the end of the song softly to myself. And if you come to see, that you could be with me…. It was a good song, and now it lay forgotten on the floor of a closet.
I went over to my desk and pulled out a fresh piece of paper. Dear Elvis, I wrote. This was his last chance.
Late one afternoon, Suralee and I were under the porch drinking Cokes into which we’d thrown handfuls of peanuts and raisins. I was going to make chili and corn bread for dinner, and Suralee was going to stay and help me cook. Dell was over visiting my mother again. She’d been outside sunbathing when he came, and he’d helped bring her in. It was so easy with him—he simply disconnected her from her vent hose and carried her, and I trundled along behind with the equipment. Times like this I wished for a full-time male caretaker, someone capable of both effortlessly lifting my mother and fixing things. Someone whose presence made for a nonspecific but very comforting sense of safety.
I made iced tea for my mother and Dell; he would help her drink it, and Suralee and I had been given an hour free. We’d told my mother we were going to Suralee’s house, but then decided it might be more interesting to eavesdrop. I’d told Suralee about times I’d listened in on Dell and my mother before, about the frankness of their talks. Now we sat quietly, heads cocked in the direction of their conversation.
It wasn’t easy to hear—the sound of the fan in the open window interfered. But we did hear Dell say, “Diana and Suralee are gone, right?”
Suralee put her hand on my arm and squeezed. “What?” I whispered. “What is it?”
“Shhhhh! Listen!”
“…over at Suralee’s,” my mother was saying. “You can call and tell them to come back if you need to go.”
“I don’t want to go,” Dell said. “That’s not what I was thinking. That’s the last thing I was thinking. I was wondering if…How long are they going to be gone?”
“Long enough,” my mother said. A long pause and then, “You can take me out of this. I’m okay for at least an hour.” I heard the abrupt silence that always followed her respirator being turned off, the sound of Dell’s steps, and then no noise at all but for the fan.
Suralee looked over at me, triumphant. I shrugged, a sudden coldness inside. “Let’s go in the backyard,” she whispered, and I shook my head no. “Come on!” she said, and I ignored her.
She crawled out from under the porch, and I unwillingly followed her around to the side of the house, to a spot in the bushes beneath my mother’s bedroom window.
Once I’d seen a neighbor girl riding her bike down the street past my house. I waved at her and thought, As soon as she waves back, she’s going to fall down. And she did. I started to go over and help her, but she hopped back onto her bike, embarrassed, and rode off quickly, apparently no worse for wear.
These things happened to me sometimes; I could predict random events with eerie accuracy. I believed I had a bit of