Just Like Home(3)

It was her mother’s voice.

Almost.

Something was different. The cold authority had drained out of Vera’s mother like brake fluid from a cut line. She spoke slowly, carefully, as if she were pushing each word out with individual effort. Her dry tongue made soft sticking sounds against her lips, against the roof of her mouth.

Her tongue must be dry. The thought clicked the new thing into place between them. Vera wasn’t home to visit. She had a job to do. A purpose. She set down her bags and crossed the threshold of the dining room.

“Do you want some water?”

“I have some, there,” Vera’s mother said, pointing to the sideboard. It was part of the dining room set Daphne and Francis had bought when they moved into the house, back when Vera was just an idea they were disagreeing about. The dining table and chairs and sideboard and china cabinet were all made of golden oak, carved with a grapevine motif that Vera had traced with her index finger as a kid.

There was a thick layer of hard, clear plexiglass on top of the sideboard now, screwed into place at the corners. A plastic hospital-pink pitcher sweated on top of the plexiglass next to a stack of waxed paper cups. Vera poured a splash of water into one of the little cups, filling it to the brim, and brought it to her mother. She wondered briefly if she should get a bigger glass—those little cups barely held a mouthful each.

But then Vera handed the cup over and noted the way her mother’s wrists shivered at the weight of it and she understood: this was the most she could expect Daphne to carry.

Vera helped lift the cup. Some of the water dribbled out of the side of her mother’s mouth, darkening the cotton at her throat. Vera looked around for a tissue, but Daphne waved her away.

“I’ve got it,” she said, wiping the water away with the side of one hand. The thin, yellowed skin of her face stretched under the pressure of her touch. Her cheeks had caved in like a mid-November jack-o’-lantern—there had to be teeth missing, Vera thought. There was no way her mother had lost enough weight to hollow out her face like that. But then her fingers brushed her mother’s hand when she took the little paper cup back, and she reconsidered.

Daphne’s fingers had always been slender. Now they were skeletal. Brittle. She looked at her mother’s wrists and saw knobs of protruding bone. So much had been whittled away.

Vera felt the first pang of regret.

She should have come home sooner. The daughter she’d always wanted to be would have come home sooner.

Vera, though, had taken more time than usual settling her affairs, rehoming fish and packing up the few things she wanted to keep and staring at herself hard in the mirror for long stretches of time. She had spread the drive home out over three days when she definitely could have done it in two. She had lingered on the front lawn, gawking up at the house, dreading what was inside.

Vera hadn’t known it would be this bad. She couldn’t have known. That whole time, her mother had been wasting away.

Daphne cleared her throat, cracking through the silence like the back of a spoon tapping the top of a crème br?lée. “You should take your things to your bedroom and get settled,” she said, her voice more even now that she’d had some water. She still sounded strange, but Vera supposed dying would do that to a person. “You must be exhausted from the drive.”

“Yeah, um. It was a long way up here from Cape Coral. And I slept in the car.” Vera stood at the side of the bed where her mother was dying, unsure of where to put her hands. Sitting on the mattress felt unspeakably overfamiliar but standing there felt like looming. And she didn’t want to go to her bedroom. Not yet. “I probably smell awful, I should take a shower.”

“Oh, I can’t smell anything anymore,” her mother said, her lips cracking as they pulled back from her teeth in a clench-jawed smile. “But I’m sure a shower will make you feel better, at least. You can use the one in the upstairs bedroom. I suppose that’s obvious, it’s not like there’s another shower you could use. Unless you want to go knock on the door to the cottage, and ask James if you can borrow his.” She cleared her throat again, a thicker, wetter sound than the first time. “Go on and get settled. I’m fine here.”

Vera’s stomach clenched at the thought of the cottage, which used to be called a ‘shed’ back before her mother decided to invite people to live in it. Ignoring it—the twist in her belly and the memories she had of that shed—she poured more water into the waxed paper cup and set it down on the rolling table beside her mother’s bed.

The dining room was all dark paneling and butter-yellow paint. The flat-pack look of that too-modern rolling table was completely out of place. The bed was similarly wrong: made of smooth white particleboard, nothing like the dark bedknobs of the bed her mother and father had once shared. That bed—the old bed—was probably still upstairs, too heavy for Daphne to have moved on her own.

The realization washed over Vera like nausea: that bed, the matching nightstands, the matching vanity, the half-empty closet. It would be up to her to decide what to do with all of it, and soon.

Sooner than she’d planned for, if Daphne was as sick as she looked.

Vera stood there, dull-eyed, contemplating the rolling table, until her mother spoke again.

“I know. It’s hideous. But it was cheap, and it’s not like”—she interrupted herself to clear her throat again, her eyes flashing—“it’s not like I’ll be using it for long.”