The Chicken Sisters(76)

“She does.” Mae spoke slowly. “She wants me to help you clean it up.”

“Oh.”

“And not just me, like me your daughter. Mae Moore me. She means Mae Moore, organizational guru.”

“She wants you to make me sparkle, then.”

Mae didn’t know if her mother meant to be funny, but she started to laugh, and once she started, she couldn’t stop. She laughed, and she cried, and she leaned on Barbara, and Patches licked both of their faces, then bounced around them joyfully. Mae’s stomach ached and her cheeks ached and she was covered in snot and tears, and the whole thing felt so bleak and hopeless that she wasn’t sure why she was laughing at all. Barbara didn’t laugh, but Mae could feel the lift of her chest as she smiled.

“Yeah. That’s exactly it. She wants me to make you sparkle, Mom.”

She could hear Aida’s cane thumping toward them, and the door opened. They’d have to tell her what had happened. Mae scrambled up and dusted herself off, then extended a hand to her mother, still on the step, and after a moment Barbara took it.

Barbara’s hand shook in hers, as it had before, and as Mae put another hand on her mother’s elbow (because helping Barbara up wasn’t easy), she realized that the tremor went back through her arm, and that her mother was somehow at once heavy and frail—and different. As she took her mother’s weight, Mae’s sense that something was wrong was so strong that she almost lost her grip, and although she managed to help her mother to her feet, she couldn’t hide her reaction to Barbara’s struggle. This was not the way Mae’s mother was supposed to be. Everything was wrong already, but this was something so much bigger that it hollowed out Mae’s chest, leaving her unable to breathe.

Aida, who in spite of a broken foot was nearly as strong and tough as she had always been, stepped quickly through the door to get behind Barbara, who took a visible moment to steady herself. The two older women exchanged looks, and then it was Mae who needed bracing. Something was happening to her mother, and now that she had tuned in to it, a dozen things she’d seen without registering them in the past few days dropped into place.

“What’s wrong? What was that?”

Barbara let out a long breath. “You better come in and sit down, Mae. It’s not that bad. It’s not that great, either, but it’s not that bad.”

A minute before, Mae would have said the hardest thing for her to do would be to walk through the door into her mother’s kitchen, but now she barely noticed the piles and boxes and ever-present faint smell of rot surrounding her. In that single instant, everything shifted. The only thing that mattered now was Barbara. Aida took a stool, and Barbara cleared a paper grocery bag off another for Mae to sit down, which she did impatiently. Mae had dozens of questions rushing through her head, each a separate and new fear—cancer, Alzheimer’s—and she didn’t dare ask a single one.

Barbara took her own stool and pulled a cup of cold coffee toward her, staring down into it as if reading tea leaves. “I’ve been having these symptoms,” she said. “I get shaky. I’m stiff. I can’t smell things like I used to.” She stirred the coffee with the spoon that was still in it, and then just as Mae was about to snatch it away and demand that she get to the point, she did. “I’ve been to a doctor, and they can’t say for certain, but their guess is early Parkinson’s disease. Which doesn’t kill you.”

Aida took Mae’s hand and held it between both of hers. “We looked it up,” she said. “On the Internet. It might not even be terrible, Mae.”

It might not even be terrible. That was her family all over. Most things were terrible, but maybe not this, not this time.

“What does it mean, then? What is it?”

Barbara reached into the grocery bag and took out one of the top papers from a huge pile, and Mae pictured the two women in the public library, printing page after page, poring over the results like rune stones. “Here’s why I went to the doctor.” She read aloud. “Shaking or tremor. Slowness of movement, called bradykinesia. Stiffness or rigidity of the arms, legs, or trunk. Trouble with balance and possible falls, also called postural instability.” She looked up. “I have all those, a little.”

“She also gets this look on her face,” said Aida. “Like she’s pissed off, even though she’s not. Resting bitch face.” Mae could tell she was proud of knowing the phrase.

“I don’t know what comes next,” said Barbara, looking down at the paper in her hand as though there were a script printed there. “It might not be much. Here. ‘Parkinson’s disease is sometimes referred to as a bespoke disease: each person experiences a different version. You cannot predict which symptoms will affect you or when and how that will happen. Some people wind up in wheelchairs; others still climb mountains. Some can’t tie a scarf, while others weave scarves by hand.’”

Parkinson’s disease. Disease, a disease. Not a death sentence, not one of the many horrors she’d been imagining, but the weight of her mother, her inability to help herself, and her great-aunt’s immediate understanding told Mae that this was big, and not new, and not going away. She could tell her mother didn’t want that to be true, so she tried to match Barbara’s light tone even while the heaviness of what was happening threatened to sink her.