Amadeo can hardly believe that they discharge his mother. They’re going to let them take her home? They’re just going to trust her care to Amadeo and Valerie and Angel?
It’s dreadful, the inevitability that his mother will hurt herself, knock into things, fall, draw a cup of hot coffee onto her lap, that even worse things are to come.
But they manage, more or less. Once a week someone from hospice checks in on them. Valerie visits on weekends, arms full of lasagnas and plastic containers of mixed greens. She lets the girls watch TV and play with the baby while she sits by Yolanda, dabbing her eyes and talking about the old days. Angel dashes around gathering laundry.
Amadeo begins to change Connor, sometimes even without being asked. Connor kicks his bare brown legs and chuckles at the novelty of his grandfather involving himself with his diaper. Each time, the second the old diaper is peeled away, Connor pees, his face going serious until the stream ebbs.
“Oh, nah!” Amadeo swabs his jeans.
“You got to be ready to cover him with a cloth!” Angel cries, laughing. Angel holds her grandmother’s arm as they make their slow, shuffling way to the bathroom. “Amazing. It only took brain cancer to get him to help out.”
Yolanda laughs, whole body, clinging to the doorway and to Angel, and Amadeo laughs, too, because he’s so grateful that Angel can still make his mother laugh.
“Hey now, that’s not fair,” he says, but they all know it is, and Connor cracks up, too, like a slightly daft dinner guest dying to get in on the joke.
“What a bunch of lunatics,” says Angel, shaking her head.
In a notebook, Angel has introduced a complex record-keeping system to track Yolanda’s medications and meals and bowel movements.
“Oh no you don’t. Don’t you be marking down those things. That’s embarrassing.”
“Why?” Angel brandishes a second notebook. “I’m in here. And Connor’s in this one. I don’t see what’s so embarrassing about knowing what your body is doing.”
“Can we keep track of my craps, too?” Amadeo asks.
“Sick,” says Angel, and Connor and Yolanda dissolve into laughter again.
It’s just over a week since Yolanda’s been released from the hospital, and she can get up and move around, with a walker for balance. She doesn’t mind using the walker, and considers this a personal failing. Her grandmother, who, when given a walker at the age of ninety-six and implored by doctors and Yolanda’s mother and Yolanda herself to please for the love of God use it, would lift it clear off the floor and lug it around the house.
She never thought she’d say it, but it’s a blessing having Amadeo unemployed. He’s so unnerved by the fact of her dying that he’s started helping around the house. He doesn’t vacuum, but she’s seen him plucking larger bits of debris off the carpet by hand. He runs the dishwasher. “Where does this go, Mom?” he calls from the kitchen, waving a measuring cup, as if he hasn’t lived in this house his entire life.
Yolanda lifts her head carefully from where it is nestled in the wing of the armchair—it’s so heavy on its stalk—and focuses on the cup in his hand. “In that bucket.” Not bucket. “Carton?” Not carton. She feels the shape of the correct word, the particular thrust and heft, but then, when she opens her mouth, the word will not emerge. “Craze?”
Amadeo watches her, his mouth ajar, lower lip trembling. He sets the measuring cup on the counter, shuts the dishwasher.
Here, in the living room, the blinds are lowered, the afternoon light thick and insinuating against the closed slats. Did they leave them drawn for her sake?
It seems only moments ago that Angel helped Yolanda dress, changed her gauze, then, with a kiss on the forehead, left for school with the baby. Yolanda’s mind is keener with Angel around. Possibly because she doesn’t want to let the girl down or scare her. It makes her long for Angel’s return, though she brings with her a wincing clatter.