Good Family Read Free

nurse, even if she is the one who wipes my mother’s bottom.
    “Wake up, honey,” she says to my mother. “You won’t believe who’s come.”
    My mother’s eye wanders briefly to the left. There is no movement in her fingers or her mouth. Only her chest rises and falls.
    “I can’t stay long,” I say for my mother’s benefit as much as Miriam’s. “I’m here to help Dana get ready. Besides,” I go on, trying to sound upbeat, “it looks as if she has everything she needs.”
    “Oh, she has everything she needs,” says Miriam, pressing her lips together.
    I push open the window so I can listen to the waves. In the distance, the drone of a motorboat. I wonder if my mother hears these things, if she hears the cawing of gulls or the sizzle of heat bugs after the rain.
    “Miriam,” I say, “do you think she can hear me?”
    “She hears you all right.”
    I lean against a bureau and look down on her. Her head has dropped to the side in an almost coy fashion is if she is flirting, but I’m convinced she can’t see me. Wouldn’t she say something? Wouldn’t she mouth my name?
    “How do you know when to feed her?” I ask Miriam.
    Miriam’s eyebrows are drawn together with vicious precision. “I feed her,” she says, matching my intonation exactly, “when she’s hungry.”
    Yes, of course, when she’s hungry. But how would Miriam know? I fix my eyes on my mother. “I don’t know what to say to her.”
    Miriam sticks a straw into my mother’s mouth. My mother’s cheeks work vigorously as her eyes roll toward me like a curious child’s. I wonder if Miriam has spiked the drink, and if that’s why my mother is sucking so earnestly. “Why don’t you tell her about your life?” Miriam suggests.
    I laugh quickly and turn away. My mother stopped asking me about my life ten years ago, so why should I inflict it upon her now? Would she really like to hear about being single and thirty-nine in New York? Or would shelike to hear about the documentaries Ian and I make—obscure narratives about obscure people who have spent their lives pursuing arcane interests? Or how I met Ian in grad school; how he got me into treatment and AA when I was starting, it seemed, from scratch? We had held each other’s hands at the close of my first meeting, both of us averse to touching, each of us refusing to say the Lord’s Prayer, our hands clutching afterward like survivors on a raft, both of us knowing we had found a kindred soul.
    “She doesn’t want to hear about my life.”
    “How would you know what she likes to hear about?”
    “I wouldn’t even know how to ask.”
    Miriam dabs at my mother’s lips. “She likes music. You like music, don’t you, Evelyn?” My mother’s eyes are intensely locked on Miriam. She doesn’t nod. Instead she makes a clicking sound, apparently with her tongue.
    “What’s she doing?” I ask.
    “She’s telling me she’s had enough.”
    Oh, dear God.
    “You can sing to her,” Miriam says to me. “You know how to sing, don’t you?”
    “If you consider a two-note range singing.”
    Miriam looks at me as though I’m beyond the pale. Her look reminds me of Louisa, and I think of how, when we were growing up on Sand Isle, the black help and the white help had different nights off. The memory of it embarrasses me now, like that picture of that little girl on the steps of an Arkansas school. I suddenly want to let Miriam know that I’m not of this place—that I’ve moved light-years away from here. I mention that I have a friend who sings scat in Harlem.
    Miriam purses her lips. “I don’t think Evelyn would appreciates cat. ”
    “How can you stand it here, Miriam?”
    Miriam smoothes my mother’s hair and begins tucking in her bedclothes. “Keep your apologies,” she says.
    I cross to the bed and join her, making hospital corners by my mother’s feet, folding them like handkerchiefs. My mother’s right hand grasps thesheet; her left lies limp. The nails on both