We are at the big round in the dining hall, the fancy room at the center where they make the residents wear suits and good shoes to dinner. Shedding the velour loungewear, important, when there is nothing else. It takes over an hour to get my mother ready. I am tense, heartbroken, dutiful. She has no idea who I am, or who she is, but lets me remove the stained hospital gown. I have to move in slow motion, reminding her limbs that moving is safe, not an attack on what has rigidified into place. It is always hot in here, all year, and stinks of soap and pine sol and bedadine solution, alcohol wipes. I am wearing those little leather flats with embroidery on the toes, the ones she bought me back before, forever ago, before the beginning of this long good-bye, when she bought herself the same pair. We were not cute that way, twinsies, ever, and this sweetness, a calm between battles. Driving shoes, she called them, back when ladies also had tidy leather driving gloves. Dark suede, not my style, but I never threw them out, and for this: I want to remember, and to forget, maybe, as she has, my brain the scuffed EtchaSketch in the waiting room, scribbled with broken language of a lifetime, spoken and unspoken, half-sentences taken and broken and stitched back together, and then “THWAP!”, gone, as the sheet is snapped back by the trickster God , saying “Just kidding!” And my belly backflops, and relaxes at once at the thought. Nothing is just one thing, yes, but the way we move through one moment is the way we move through everything. Mrs. Quan in the next room is wailing again, shoes scuffle outside. I wish I could smell the snow. I want to bring a snowball to her room, but really it is just a cold thing in her palm, and all she can say is…”Ow.”
