Lawyer for the Dog Read Free

I can’t tell how much of the sermon she understands but at least she seems soothed by the sound of the minister’s voice, or perhaps she’s pleased just to have her daughter sitting next to her in church.
    Her doctor has warned me that these relatively peaceful days won’t last forever, that her “spells”—outbursts of agitation or anxiety in which she cries for no reason and paces back and forth in front of the TV, or wakes at night screaming—will come more often, and that she may stop eating.
    â€œWhat will you do then?” Ellen asks. Ellen Sadler is my best friend, a prosecutor with a heart, as close to a well-balanced person as I’ve ever known.
    â€œI guess I’ll have to buy those liquid supplements. I think she’d like the chocolate.”
    â€œNo,” says Ellen, “I mean, when you can’t keep her at home.”
    â€œI can’t think that far ahead.” This isn’t true, because of course I’ve thought about it. The truth is that I hope my mother will die before I have to make that decision. I can hardly admit this to myself, much less to my friend. And it isn’t just that I want my mother to die for her sake—how many times did I hear her say she wouldn’t want to live if her mind were gone?—but I want her to die for my sake, because I’m not at all sure I’m capable of mothering my mother much longer, and I promised her I’d never put her in a nursing home.
    â€œWell, you know I’m here for you,” says Ellen. And she is, of course, but even Ellen can’t put herself in my place, can’t imagine what it’s like. Nobody can, unless they’re living it. “Are you coming to the book club meeting?” she asks.
    â€œI haven’t read the book.”
    â€œCome anyway. You haven’t been in months,” she says. “Want me to pick you up?”
    â€œI’d have to arrange for the night sitter…”
    â€œYou can’t just hole up every night with your mother,” Ellen says. “She wouldn’t want that for you.”
    Ellen is right, of course. But then almost nothing about my life is what my mother wanted for me.
    My mother wanted me to get just enough education to carry on an intelligent conversation, but not so much, God forbid, that anyone would ever mistake me for an “intellectual.” She wanted me to be able to earn a living, but only on a temporary basis while I supported a husband through law or medical school, or in case of dire emergency, such as sudden widowhood. “You’d make a wonderful administrative secretary,” she’d say, “or a teacher.” She’d gone back to teaching after my father died. But—though she never actually said this, I knew what she thought—it would be a bad idea for me to think about a career. “Those women can be so … oh, you know … men don’t like them.”
    My mother wanted me to have children—two or three, more than that would be tacky—and do volunteer work with the Junior League and church committees and learn to play a civilized sport that would keep me from getting fat. Tennis or golf, maybe, with stylish outfits.
    She wanted me to have a nice house, kept spotless by a maid who’d come no less than twice a week, and a big yard full of azaleas and camellias, tended to by a black man who knew to knock on the back door if he needed something but did not expect to be invited inside.
    What she wanted for me was what she’d always wanted for herself.
    *   *   *
    The night before the first hearing in Hart v. Hart , Mom and I sit on the balcony at sundown. I do some research on my laptop while she watches a Navy cruiser head out toward the ocean. When it’s time to go inside she says, “Lost something.” She’s always losing things—the TV remote, her purse, her toothbrush—but this time she