The End of the World as We Know It Read Free Page B

fucking house,” I yelled. “I come home to see you as often as I can. I never take a vacation, never go anywhere else but here. I bring you presents. And you can’t wait five fucking minutes to have supper?”
    My mother got up and walked out of the room. My father sat there and said nothing, as though he’d been hit by a baseball bat. I served myself some food and ate in silence. Later, when the twilight was coming on and the light was turning blue, I found my mother in the house and asked her to go for a walk in the garden. To look at my aunt’s roses. My mother had long since given up on her own roses.
    She said she didn’t want to go anywhere with me. I said, “Look. This is what happens in real families. They have fights. They make up. They go for a walk in the garden.” I lived in New York. That was what New York families did. My mother, who supposedly was not drinking, rose unsteadily to her feet and we headed for the door.
    To get to the roses, you had to cross the gravel driveway and, in the middle, my mother fell down and scraped her elbow very badly on the rocks. She tried to get up, but she couldn’t, so I picked her up in my arms, she was light as a leaf, and carried her back into the house, up the stairs, and laid her on her bed. Sheand my father didn’t sleep in the same bedroom anymore. My father snored. Maybe that was the reason.
    No, the real reason was that my mother would go to sleep around nine and then she’d wake up at midnight and the liquor would be too far away and she couldn’t get back to sleep so she’d lie in bed and play solitaire for hours, sometimes all night. Many, many nights, both drunk and sober, I’d lie in bed and listen to the slap of the cards as she tried and tried to get a perfect run.
    Her elbow was raw and bleeding. She had changed into her nightgown and her arms were so thin, the front hanging limply on one side where she’d lost a breast some years before. She was hunched over with the pain. I went into the bathroom, looking for some Neosporin and some gauze, but there wasn’t any gauze and, because I had had some drinks and I was in a rush to go out to a party, I pulled some Icy Hot out of the medicine cabinet by mistake and went back to her bedroom and rubbed it all over my mother’s wound.
    She gave a small distant cry. “Oh. That hurts so much. It hurts.” The tears were rolling down her cheeks. I ran to the bathroom and wet a washrag and went back and tried to wipe away the burning Icy Hot, but of course it was deep in the wound by then, and it wouldn’t come out, and I was late for the party, and I finally said, “There. It’ll be all right now.” And I left her, I left her in burning pain, and I’ve never forgiven myself.
    When my mother began really to die because the varices had come back, I was in a recording session in New York, making some fool commercial, some jingle. My sister called and told me about the anemia and the blood and I hung up the phone and said to everybody, “My mother’s dying,” and I got up andwent home and called my friend Rocco, who was a doctor in Nashville. I described her symptoms, and asked him what was going to happen.
    â€œYour mother will weaken because they won’t be able to stop the blood. She won’t get the best care because doctors don’t try very hard with alcoholics because they know they’ll just do it again. She’ll start to lose her mind and dementia will set in, so if you want to have a rational conversation with her, you better go fast. And she’ll be dead in ten days.” I went down the next afternoon.
    It was hot late August, almost Labor Day, and my mother was moved to a hospital in Roanoke, fifty miles away. Every morning I’d get up and drive my father to see her, and every afternoon I’d drive back and see her again about five o’clock. I don’t remember what we talked