soon.”
“Don’t waste my time,” Gram says. “I know all that. After this other hospital, I want to go back to my room. It’s very important to me. I want you to promise me that you’ll make that happen.”
“Mother, you need to be in a safe and supportive environment. It’s possible that you’ll need more care from now on, and the other building has more advanced medical care available. I want you to be realistic about that possibility. I am not going to make false promises. We’ll just have to wait and see what kind of progress you make.”
When my mother finishes talking, Gram turns her face away and closes her eyes.
“Did you hear me, Mother? You shouldn’t be concerned. No matter what room you have, we’ll decorate it however you like. We’ll hang the pictures in the exact same formation on the walls, if that makes you feel better.”
Gram has slipped away again, to sleep or to unconsciousness. She does not answer.
LATER THAT afternoon, in the hall, I say to my mother, “You should have told Gram that she could go home to her room.”
My mother has trouble making eye contact with me, which has been the case since Easter. She looks over my shoulder, or down at her hands. She likes to rotate her left hand while she talks, making the diamond on her engagement ring flash under the lights.
“Your grandmother is failing,” she says. “It’s my job as her oldest child to take care of her. I can’t give in to her whims, Gracie. I have to do what is right.”
The ring flashes, and the fact that my mother won’t look at me makes me feel a little nuts. I have so few conversations these days. I am so often alone. I say, “You’re not really the oldest child.”
“What?”
Now I feel mean, and guilty. “You had an older sister, didn’t you?”
I can feel my mother’s eyes on me, poring over my dirty hair, my ill-fitting clothes. She says, “Why would you talk about that? You’ve always let yourself get caught up in those old stories. What’s past is past. I don’t see the point. What is the point?”
Maybe she’s right. Maybe I don’t put enough stock in the present, in what is real. The most recent phone message from Grayson said, “Snap out of it, Gracie. It’s time to get back to living your life.”
But I can’t really agree with the narrow vision my mother and Grayson fix on the world. The past and the present are each important. They share equal weight, don’t they? That’s why it is so hard to make decisions. There is always so much to consider. I say, “They’re not just stories, Mother. They’re our family’s history.”
She blinks a few times rapidly. “I have been the oldest, the one my parents depended on, forever. And now that my mother is sick, I have to make choices for her. Do you think Pat is going to step up to the plate? Or Meggy? No. That doesn’t mean I like playing this role, Gracie, and it doesn’t mean it’s fair. Life is not fair. But I am a person who takes my responsibilities seriously.”
This is a dig at my pregnancy. Any person who takes her responsibilities seriously would not let herself become a single parent. My mother is telling me that she would have done it differently, better. Hell, she did do it better, at least in her own mind.
I wish that Lila were here, so we could share a look and roll our eyes. She has barely shown up at the hospital. We spend a lot of time together at home, though, each in our pajamas. I don’t ask her why she stopped going to school, and I don’t ask her about Weber. I know about him because I ran into him one afternoon at the supermarket and he told me that he was hot and heavy with my sister. I think she’s crazy to get involved with that jerk, but I keep my opinion to myself. I have been keeping everything to myself lately.
I take a deep breath and say, “Well then, as the head of the family you must know that Meggy and Angel came to my house a few weeks ago and asked me to give my baby to Angel and Johnny to raise.”
The look on my mother’s face confirms that she didn’t know anything about it. She clasps her hands, and the diamond ring is covered. “They wouldn’t have—”
“They did.