Mother asks to have her chair taken down. An unnecessary demand when there are so many good chairs already on the patio, most of them bought to replace ones Mother complained about at one time or another. Still she insists on her chair, the battered chair, the heavy chair, the chair that is an eyesore among the canvas and beech sling backs, the chair that scrapes the walls on its way out of and back into the house. The cushions to mother’s chair have to be beaten. The hinges don’t like to bend. Metal tears at skin and clothes. Sandy can’t believe Mother’s gone this long without asking for it.

Husband maneuvers the chair out of the sliding door with no verbal complaints, just a silly smile and a glance toward his wife over Mother’s head. Years ago, the same glance may have been an acknowledgment of mutual annoyance, but Husband has since sided with Mother.

Mother watches the proceedings of her chair. “I don’t see why you don’t keep the chair out here so it wouldn’t be such a bother,” she says. Lipstick edges over the outline of her mouth, a little bit on her cheek.

“No bother, Mother, no bother.” Husband shakes the handles of the chair, pounds on cranky metal parts with the heel of his palm. He has argued with Sandy to keep the chair outside, but she won’t have it among her sling backs.
Sandy’s silence says, “It is a bother. You’re always a bother.” She smokes by the screen door. “Put it in the shade,” she says. She holds in the smoke and it pricks her lungs. Mother’s legs have thinned but her breasts and stomach and jaw are full and healthy. She smells sour before she’s washed and applied powder. Sandy is not sure how she manages the tub. It is old with tall sides, a narrow opening and nothing to hold on to. Mother has not asked for help and Sandy has not offered. With every passing moment, Sandy is sure she if failing her more.

Husband moves the chair a few feet into the shade, collects the cushions and beats them over the sea wall with his fist so he will not have to sweep up later. Husband’s stiffness, the way his fist beats the faded flowers of the cushion say to his wife, “Cool it.” Husband thinks Sandy is cruel to Mother, that she should be able to control her annoyances, deflect and steer them, shun the inappropriate ones. Husband loses his temper easily when he’s driving. Sandy has that over him.

Mother settles into her chair and looks out to the sea. Her eyes are dim, dusty bulbs. She has arthritis pain all the time now, other pains she talks about less, and everything to complain about. When she arrived, it was the ferry ramp, how her feet stuck on the carpet and people pushed past her with giant bags. Who needs all that stuff, she said, but she always comes with three large suitcases of her own, red vinyl with yarn tassels tied to their handles. She complains that her clothes are too tight, too rough, elastic bra straps and waistbands grab at her skin though they are the same clothes from the year before. Nothing is soft enough, and the toilet paper is too soft, too expensive. Sandy’s hair is too flat, the freezer too cluttered. Sandy doesn’t remember all these things mattering before.

They watch the rocks in the sea. There are three rocks, tall and round and it is on them that their eyes settle when they sit together like this. In the morning, the rocks are beige and as the sun moves higher, they whiten, absorb the color into their skin and release it with full fury in the setting sun. Birds gather on the rocks now, more than had been there before. Birds gather and scatter, gather and scatter all day long, all the time. It is what they do and they never seem to tire of it.

Sandy sits next to mother and puts her hand over mother’s hand. It twitches, mother’s hand. Sandy does not take it as an involuntary twitch but as a sign her own hand is unwanted, a suffocating factor, not warm or comforting. Why does mother always make her feel this way?

A dinghy bell tolls. Waves pull back on the shore and crackle over stones. A distant plane purrs somewhere on the other side of the island. Dim eyes strain to see the dark yellow crescent of the beach below.

....more stuff happens...
Husband’s mother took only three months to die, maybe less. He knows nothing of dying, Sandy thinks. His mother had been playing golf one month, dead the next, or the one after that. One day her hand wouldn’t unbend. And then her elbows wouldn’t unbend, and then her legs did the same, as if her whole body was going to sleep without telling her ahead of time. And then she was just eyeballs moving under eyelids stuck open. And then she was gone. Sandy’s father had gone quickly, too. Digging a ditch one day, dead of a heart attack the next. That is not dying, Sandy decides. That is only death, and death is clearly the lesser of the two. Her mother won’t go that easily. She will fall many more times. She will refuse Sandy’s help. She will take a long time.

Sandy goes to the shed to find Husband shaving a dent into a block of wood with a planing knife. “Another lopsided doorstop?” she asks. He presses down and forward on the blade and a sliver of wood peels and curls in front of the tool.

“Where’s your mother?” He plucks the shaving from the block of wood and adds it to a pile of others. A pile of tongues, Sandy thinks, a project that won’t amount to anything. She pulls up a stool, wraps her toes on the metal rung.

“Why don’t you make coasters? Something useful?” She runs her finger in the dent. She does not feel like fighting with him after all.

“Can’t be too hard. Coasters.” He hangs the plane on the wall next to a hammer. It is apparent to Sandy now the block of wood is much too large for a coaster. He waits for her to remove her hand from the wood before he wraps it in a cloth and tucks it under the bench. She can see the weight of it in his forearm when he lifts it. She wants to press her cheek into the wood shavings on the table and stay here all night. She has been thinking of a song her mother used to sing to her. It is the only thing that makes her want to cry. If she can convince her husband to stay here with her or swim out to the rocks and climb them with her or sink himself into her breasts and cry for her, it will not be another night lost in her memory. It will not be so bad.

But there is dinner to get started and Husband offers to grill. Another night will pass with cooking and cleaning and ushering the children to bed. Sandy climbs the embankment behind Husband, slower. A dark figure is turning lights on in the house. The patio stones have lost the heat of the day, gone cold.

....keeps happening...
Mother helps shape hamburger patties at the kitchen counter. There is a bowl of chop meat mixed with egg and seasoning they both work from. The patties on the ceramic platter are lumpy with handprints. Mother’s fingers move slowly, but she insists on helping. Mother tucks another patty onto the platter then discards the empty styrofoam tray where the store-bought meat had been. She is careful not to spill the leftover blood in the tray until she has it over the garbage can, but a drop gets on the floor.

Sandy quickly throws a paper towel over it and sweeps the blood up with her foot. She presses the last pattie into shape and arranges it on the tray so it does not stick to any others. The smallest one is mother’s and Sandy will crumble it in a bowl after it’s cooked.

Mother fills the empty bowl with hot, soapy water. She puts her hands under the running water and scrapes the film of meat from them, working it out from under her fingernails. Sandy watches to see how mother moves, to see if she struggles with the faucet or faulters when shaking water from the rinsed bowl. She can’t help herself.

Mother looks at Husband through the open window above the kitchen sink. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” she says. Husband is outside reading a magazine and waiting for the grill to heat. Mother has seen Husband folding clothes and scrubbing the grill. Sandy wishes it were that simple.

“Your lipstick.” Sandy brushes a smudge from her mother’s cheek, and when she’s done, Mother looks mildly startled, searches her reflection in the door of the microwave oven. Sandy keeps moving, tucks ketchup and cheese under her arm. Mother picks up the salt and pepper shakers, leaves the tray of hamburgers for Sandy to carry, and when Sandy walks outside, she follows.

....more stuff happens having to do with dirty dentures...
Mother comes into the kitchen pink and perfumed wearing the same outfit she arrived in, a blue blazer with a rhinestone pin on the lapel and a pretty blouse. Husband helps her into a chair, tells her how lovely she looks. Mother would not have allowed Sandy to do the same. “Stop treating me like a child,” she says when Sandy stoops over a deck chair to help her out. Last week, Mother tried on a pair of shoes and when Sandy asked her how they felt, she said she didn’t know. “Are they comfortable?” Sandy asked. Mother just stared at the plate glass window beating with sunlight and the colors of Main Street, said she didn’t know. “What do you mean you don’t know?” Sandy insisted. “How do they feel?” Mother patted the ground with the toes of the new shoes, stayed in the chair, said she didn’t know. “Do they hurt?” Mother said no. “Do you like them?” Mother said she didn’t know.

Husband leaves to get Mother’s bags and pack the car. Sandy pours her mother a cup of coffee, pushes the milk and sugar toward her. “How did you sleep, Mom?”

“Fine.” She picks the dentures out of the napkin. “They’ll have to be soaked,” she says, “I don’t think there’s time.” Her esses are full of static.

“I’ll pack you some yogurt, a banana, soft things. You won’t go hungry.” Hunger is not what Mother’s thinking about, Sandy knows. She’ll be on the ferry with no teeth. She’ll make the trip with her mouth closed, won’t let anyone see.

“I rinsed them,” Sandy says. They both know it’s not good enough. Without being soaked there’s a risk of infection. Every time Husband carries another bag through the hall, he smiles at them. Husband will take mother to the ferry and he’ll return empty-handed.

“Do you remember that song you sang to me when I was little?” Sandy tries.
“There were a lot of songs,” Mothers says. Her eyes are gray and coated, her skin puffy and pink where her chest is exposed. Her bra strap is loose and dangling a little.
“You sang it all the time.” Sandy tries to sound easy but she is suddenly desperate to have her mother remember it.
“You never stopped crying, and when you weren’t crying you were whining.” Mother puts her hand to her neck and her lobes where her pearls used to be.
“It was about beetles.”
“Yellow Submarine?” her mother asks. “I sang that one. I would have shot myself if I didn’t sing. You never stopped crying and I was all alone.”
There is a little bit of coffee in the spoon and Sandy tilts it so the coffee spills onto the napkin. “I don’t remember it,” Mother says.
“You’re wearing your new shoes,” Sandy says. She has just noticed.
“There were a lot of songs,” Mother says.
“I know,” Sandy says. “I know.”

When Mother is gone, it is still early. Sandy sits in Mother’s chair. The chair smells like damp newspapers and gasoline, as if it has been stored too long in the garage. Sandy feels for the bubbles of rust under the metal arms, chips at them with her fingernails. Even with the thick cusions, the chair is too much at an angle to be comfortable. Her shoulders feel as if they’re hunched forward, her breasts pushed toward her knees, which is why Mother likes it, because it is easy to get up and down in this chair. It’s not like Sandy has not known this all along. It only makes things worse.

The rocks are pink and grey and the sky a soft blue. Seagulls skirt around the rocks, and the ones that have landed peck their wings and hop from foot to foot. There are white caps on the ocean today, and a breeze that shakes the canvas of the deck chairs. The ocean is rough, slaps the shoreline.

Sandy listens to the seagulls crow, watches them abandon the shore and fly away. Maybe they sense something she does not. The hum of a pier emptying of people and cars. The smell of food scraps flattened into an empty parking lot. The clatter of a ferry ramp rolling backwards. The vibration of a ferry as it begins its slow march to the opposite shore. Sandy will ask Husband to put the chair away as soon as he comes home. Mother will ask to have it taken out next summer, will fall three more times and last another four years.