Nothing Extra

The next morning, while it was still dark out, she took a cab to the airport. It was a bleak hour, too much to ask of a friend, even if her mother was dying. The sort of favor you’d ask only of a husband— not an ex-husband—or a wife. She wept quietly in the back seat, hoping her occasional snuffling snorts were muffled by the tinny Bollywood lament emanating from a cd player sitting on the passenger seat next to the turbaned driver. An hour later, when he hoisted her heavy suitcases from the trunk and set them on the ground in front of Midwest Express, he touched her lightly on the arm and said in high school English, ‘‘I am seeing that you are very somber. You are going on a long journey?’’

‘‘My mother’s dying,’’ she said, despite the fact that it was the thought of being a newly single woman (with no one to drive her to the airport at 5 a.m. on a raw, rainy San Francisco morning) that had set off the crying jag, more than the dying mother per se.

The driver bobbed his head elegiacally and then reached through the open door of his cab, unhooked some wooden prayer beads from his rearview mirror, and offered them to her. She shook her head as if to say No, no, I couldn’t possibly, at the same time that she found herself reaching out to accept them.

The rented bed had been delivered the day before she arrived. While her father drove her mother to her doctor’s appointment, Trish spent the morning arranging furniture and freshly cut flowers from the back yard. She positioned the bed so her mother could look through the French doors into the garden. She took her old Pioneer stereo, a junior high graduation gift, from her own room and set it up next to her mother’s bed. As she dusted the antique turntable in the silent room, a babble of girlish teenage voices clamored in her ears, a chorus of clueless, self-absorbed, sex-crazed ghosts. Hours and hours on their princess phones complaining about who had the worst, the most pathetic, disgusting, unfair witch of a mother. Who knew, back then, that those seemingly immortal mortal enemies would someday grow old, weaken, and leave them on their own, unprotected, with no one who even cared enough to repeat, for the millionth time, how breakfast was the most important meal of the day?

Exhausted by her outing to the doctor’s office, her mother allowed herself to be tucked in to the freshly made bed for ‘‘a short nap.’’ The stoneware mug seemed heavy in her hand. Trish watched nervously, afraid her mother was going to scald herself with Darjeeling. But despite her physical frailty, her mother looked sort of terrific. Finally she’d lost the extra weight she’d struggled to lose ever since Trish could remember, one miracle diet after another. You could see the fine bone structure of her face again, the delicate collarbones that Trish recognized from old photographs. After the final round of chemotherapy, no more miraculous than all those torturous diets, her mother’s hair had sprouted again, a feathery silver cap, baby soft. Pixieish. Oddly enough she looked younger without the mane of thick brown hair—‘‘luminized’’ in recent years—that had always been her greatest vanity. She seemed lighter and brighter than the last time Trish had visited, Easter weekend, when everyone—despite the doctor’s reticence—was still speaking in this relentless, almost bullying tone of voice about her recovery, her resurrection. Her mother seemed relieved. She seemed grateful that they had all stopped pestering her. When she could keep her eyes open, she read the Buddhist books that Carlos, Trish’s older brother, a gay Zen monk and hospice volunteer, had sent her. Carlos had watched many people die, including his longtime partner, Roc. And the one before him.

During the flight to Kansas City and the two-hour shuttle ride to Columbia, Trish had a vision of how things would be when she got there. How she would rise to the occasion, setting aside her own recent marital miseries, and set the tone. The tone she envisioned was a kind of idealized family vacation without any squabbling in the back seat. She would revert to a mature, responsible version of her twelve-year-old self—their adorable and adoring only daughter, all sugar and spice, before she hit puberty. Before she knew what ‘‘sarcastic’’ meant. Before she knew what was cool and uncool. Before she dumped them, her two bewildered uncool parents, who sat there at the dinner table like two starved dogs groveling for crumbs of conversation about her day.

So after cooking supper and washing the dishes that first evening home, Trish retrieved half a dozen battered board games from the attic: Scrabble, Clue, Chinese Checkers, Monopoly, Parcheesi, and Risk. The classics. Fun for all ages. Although the boxes were shabby and pieces were missing, suggesting they had played them often and vigorously, the fact was they hadn’t. The games were boring. As the youngest, she was the one who had pleaded with the others to play: Come on, just one game. When she had chicken pox, her mother and father took turns playing an endless game of Monopoly with her as she swilled glass after glass of Hawaiian Punch. But it didn’t really count, in her mind, unless they all played, the entire family. Fun for the entire family, like the ads said.

On TV or at her friends’ homes, it seemed to her that families sat around the kitchen table ribbing each other good-naturedly or else huddled around the tv watching other families on TV sitting around the kitchen table ribbing each other good-naturedly. In her own house there were three television sets—one in the den, one in her parents’ bedroom, and one in her brother’s room that he had purchased with his lawn-mowing money. One evening as she roamed the house, restless, she noted that the three of them were all watching Dallas on separate TV sets. Her brother (who had recently changed his name from Carl to Carlos, after Carlos Castaneda) wasn’t really watching the show so much as gazing at the flickering box in a stoned daze. You could have flipped the channel to Dynasty and he wouldn’t have even noticed it was Denver. She walked outside into the dark yard and climbed on the huge trampoline she’d asked for and received for her tenth birthday, a couple of years earlier. She hardly ever used it anymore. It was covered with pine needles and bird crap. She started jumping, slowly at first, then faster, higher, until she collapsed flat on her back, her heart still jumping inside her chest. Distant hazy stars hung in the sky. After a while it started to drizzle, and she just lay there feeling the rain soak her flimsy baby doll pajamas. She could smell wet rose petals from the garden. She could see the cat sitting on her bedroom windowsill; he seemed to be staring out at her, the only one aware of her absence.

In those half dozen days before her brother—en route by car from Sonoma County—showed up, things went more or less the way she had scripted them in her imagination. Every night she fell into her monastic twin bed with its virginal dust ruffle, satisfied that she had done her part, that her presence was both comforting and necessary, that her parents would have been lost without her. During the day she shopped for groceries, prepared simple meals (which her mother dutifully mimed eating), read old magazines while her mother dozed, made small talk with her dad when he passed through, and did the endless loads of laundry. Occasionally, at her mother’s request, she would read aloud from the stack of books sent by Carlos, who had actually sent her a couple of the same books (Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind; The Cloud of Unknowing; When Things Fall Apart) after Jeffrey left her. She had read maybe a couple pages before slamming the covers shut. She hated this BIG MIND bullshit. The cosmic perspective. The only thing that got her out of bed those mornings following the unilateral separation was her Small Mind—that vengeful, aggrieved, self-righteous Energizer Bunny of Ego.

In the evenings when her mother’s energy sometimes peaked for a couple hours, they played games, working their way through Monopoly, Clue, and Scrabble. The three of them stretched and yawned and glanced at their watches, but the den was cozy with a pretty fake fire and soft jazz playing on the college radio station. For the first time since her husband had moved out, she didn’t feel weightless. It was, surprisingly, a relief to be far, far away from Berkeley—Berzerkeley—in this quiet, orderly, quaint setting. The devoted spinster daughter. The devoted high school English teacher on her summer vacation. All she needed was an embroidery hoop.

Carlos and his dog, a beige shih tzu named Tommy Tune, arrived at suppertime. Trish and Carlos’s mother was sitting at the table in her nightgown, staring down a small glass dish of green Jell-O. With one hand she hoisted the spoon to her lips, masticating each quivering translucent emerald cube as if it were Astroturf. With the other hand she stroked the cat to sleep on her lap. When she caught sight of her prodigal son coming through the front door, her face lit up with such radiant relief, such rapturous anticipation of something, that Trish felt instantly jilted. She stood up to clear the table. As Carlos hugged their mother, the frumpy shih tzu skittered across the linoleum, making a clumsy beeline for the cat’s bowl of Meow Mix. The slumbering cat morphed into a hissing, spitting monster, digging its claws into their mother’s thigh as he shot out of the room, a furry cartoon blur of panicked indignation. Unfazed, the dog (bequeathed to Carlos by one of his hospice patients) proceeded to scarf up the cat chow.

‘‘Woooo-hooo!’’ Her brother shook his shaved head. ‘‘Wow.’’ He looked in the direction the cat had streaked off. ‘‘That cat must be halfway to Kathmandu by now.’’

Their father laughed, the first time she had heard him laugh since she’d been home. Trish glared at them both. ‘‘That was a pretty dumb thing to do,’’ she said. ‘‘You might have orchestrated the introduction.’’

‘‘Oh, they’ll work it out,’’ their mother said, the same mother who had never allowed her to have a dog her entire deprived childhood. She slid the nightgown up almost to her crotch to examine the bright red scratches, like desperate skid marks on the pale stretch of her deflated thighs. Trish averted her eyes, scraping the green Jell-O into the disposal, remembering her mother’s suntanned thighs beneath a flirty white tennis skirt, plump and plucky. Blotting the beads of blood with a paper napkin, her mother looked a little shaky. ‘‘I think I’ll just lie down for a bit,’’ she said.

‘‘I’ll get the Neosporin,’’ Trish told her, folding the dishtowel. She looked at the kitchen clock. ‘‘Monopoly in half an hour? She smiled brightly, aiming for a chipper ‘‘Tennis anyone?’’ sort of tone. Carlos just looked at her as if she were and always would be his lame little sister.

Her father rubbed his hands together like the greedy villain of silent films. He was something like a zillion dollars and a hundred hotels ahead in their nightly tournament, showing no mercy.

Carlos helped their mother to her feet and guided her into the den with the dog snapping at their heels, anxious to be included.

‘‘I’ll make you a cup of Golden Empress Tea!’’ Trish called after them, as she set the teakettle on the burner. She had read about the tea in one of the holistic medicine magazines she skimmed through periodically at the bookstore. It was supposed to vanquish nausea. In testimonial after testimonial, people swore by it. But her mother hated the rotten fruit smell, ‘‘like a compost heap.’’

‘‘I don’t want any!’’ she heard her mother’s petulant voice raised in protest, as if Trish were trying to poison her.

‘‘It’s okay, Mom,’’ she heard her brother reply in a soothing conspiratorial voice. ‘‘I have something better.’’

They did not finish their Monopoly game that night—or any other night. They did not play Clue or Scrabble. The boxes began to collect dust under the rented bed. And her mother drank not another drop of Golden Empress Tea. When Trish appeared in the den with the Neosporin in one hand and a cup in the other, Carlos was sitting on the edge of their mother’s bed packing marijuana into the small silver bowl of a purple bong. A baggie of dope lay on the night table. Trish’s mouth dropped open as if she were a bad actress. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen an actual bong in person rather than in some ridiculous movie. She wondered if her brother had brought the bong with him from the West Coast or had hidden it in his old room lo these many years.

Carlos was intent upon firing up the pipe. Trish looked at her father, who was perched on the edge of the armchair watching Carlos. She looked at her mother, burrowed into her nest of pillows, and was about to say something when her mother held up her hand like a traffic cop. Silenced, Trish sat down in one of the uncomfortable ladder-back chairs. She set the ointment and cup of tea on the floor. The dog ambled over, took a whiff, sneezed, and scurried away.

The water was bubbling in the purple bong. Carlos held the pipe to their mother’s lips. She inhaled and coughed the smoke out. Carlos passed the bong to their father. Then he turned back to their mother, holding a glass of water in his patient, steady hand as their mother took a couple of baby-bird sips. Their father held the bong out to Trish who shook her head, arms folded across her chest. ‘‘Try it again, like this,’’ Carlos coached their mother. She tried again, holding the smoke in longer, sputtering less, eyes closed. In the dim light you couldn’t see her feathery cap of newborn silver hair. Carlos nodded and smiled beneficently. Their mother smiled and nodded back, their two bald heads in sync.

Trish felt out of it, like a narc. Not that she was some dare Goody Two-Shoes. She’d done her share of drugs in her day. She lived in Berkeley, after all. It wasn’t the marijuana so much as Carlos. How he always took over. How nothing was going to be the same now that he was here. He bent over and blew a lungful of smoke into the shih tzu’s face. The dog seemed to inhale and shut its bulgy eyes like a veteran pothead. Their mother and father actually giggled. Trish tossed the tube of ointment onto the bed and left the room. For the first time since she’d arrived home she wondered how long this whole sad business was going to last and whether she had it in her to go the distance. The doctors couldn’t say for sure how long her mother might last. Some days their mother seemed right on the brink, half gone already; other days she seemed to come back. It was not at all as Trish had expected—a gradual fading away like a glass of water evaporating on a nightstand.

As she climbed the stairs to her room, she could hear her parents laughing and the dog barking excitedly at something and then Carlos ordering the dog to be quiet: ‘‘Quiet, Tommy Tune! Quiet!’’ In her room the cat was lying on the other twin bed. She threw herself down and looked at her watch: eight o’clock. Only six in California. She pictured Jeffrey in the kitchen swigging Gatorade, sweaty from his five-mile jog in Tilden Park, checking his voice mail for a lovey-dovey message from the former Other Woman who had, against the statistical odds, beaten out The Wife.

Her room, the smallest of the bedrooms, swelled with heat. The old air-conditioning vents functioned erratically upstairs, creating different climate zones. To walk across the hall from her brother’s room to her own was like plunging from the cool green air of Vermont to the sticky bayous of Louisiana. So she got up and pried open her window. The new kids across the street in the Franklins’ old house were having a duel with garden hoses, shrieking with vengeful delight.

At midnight she awoke to the raw, scraping voice of Janis Joplin wailing about summertime. She had drifted off reading The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, a dog-eared copy she’d pulled from the bookshelf next to her bed. It was as if she’d fallen asleep during a power outage and then been bolted awake in the darkness to the tv, stereo, refrigerator, dishwasher, and dryer all blaring back to life at once. An electronic Tower of Babel. The old album was scratched and warped. Trish’s first fuzzy flash of fear had been for the cat, her mother’s cat yowling for his life, until her ears recognized the frenzied yowls as lyrics: ‘‘Your daddy’s rich . . . And your Maaaamaaaa’s good-lookin’ . . . Hush little baby . . .’’ Abruptly, someone turned down the volume.

What the fuck? She hauled herself up out of the cuddly chintz chair and marched downstairs. Her father was kneeling on the carpet next to three orange crates, sorting old albums into piles. On the top of two piles she glimpsed Let It Bleed and Abbey Road. In his hand was a copy of some Grateful Dead album that looked as if an entire rainbow-colored candle had melted onto it. He slipped the album out of its paper sleeve and examined it with a regretful expression, and then set it on top of The White Album, which looked as if a tire had flattened it.

Her mother was propped up in bed scarfing down mini pretzels. The dog sat at attention, his eyes bulging with desperate hope each time the cellophane crackled. Every so often her mother tossed him a pretzel, which he caught in midair with surprisingly sleek agility, like a shaggy dolphin. Her father switched the album on the turntable. She recognized a stupid song from some oldies radio station that Jeffrey liked to listen to, drumming his fingertips on the steering wheel. ‘‘Proud Mary. Rolling, roll—llinnggg down the riiiiv—vver.’’ Cretins Clearwater Rival, he always called them, even though he cranked up the volume every time. Her mother nibbled each pretzel from the outer edge inward, slowly but steadily. It was the most Trish had seen her eat all week.

‘‘Looks like someone’s got the munchies,’’ Trish said, striving for the tone of someone in a good mood. She tried not to stare at her father, now dancing by himself with a dazed retro expression.

‘‘Want a pretzel?’’ Her mother tilted the bag toward Trish, precariously close to the edge of the bed. The dog stood erect, on high alert. Trish shook her head. Her mother shrugged as a windfall of pretzels tumbled onto the carpet that Trish had vacuumed earlier in the day. The dog hoovered them right up. Her mother and father laughed.

‘‘Do we have any ice cream?’’ her mother asked.

Trish nodded and headed for the freezer. In the light from the open fridge she could make out the shadowy fluid shape of her brother doing tai chi in the dark yard. She took some frozen vanilla yogurt and a spoon back to the den, where her mother had drifted off in the ten seconds that Trish had been gone. The record player needle hit a deep scratch and stuck. Her father leaped to the turntable and nudged the needle forward like an old pro.

‘‘This is so great,’’ he exclaimed. ‘‘Turntables are so great. Why’d they ever switch to CVs anyway?’’ He looked at her as if he really didn’t know, as if he expected an answer.

‘‘CDs,’’ she corrected him. ‘‘Because they have better sound quality and don’t scratch.’’

‘‘But scratches are real. Scratches are life experience.’’ He looked a bit overawed by the profundity of his own insight. He seemed to be waiting for her response. ‘‘Don’t you see?’’ he urged, the sincerity in his voice making her turn away, embarrassed for him. He was her father, after all. Not some hippie-dippie. You saw them all the time in Berkeley, these tie-dyed throwbacks selling beaded jewelry a five-year-old could make, as clueless as those isolated Japanese soldiers who were discovered every now and then on some tiny remote island, still fighting World War II twenty years after defeat.

‘‘It’s kind of late,’’ she said, looking pointedly at her watch. ‘‘Don’t you think you should go to bed?’’ Usually he ‘‘hit the hay’’ by ten. He would watch Jay Leno’s monologue and then snap out the light.

‘‘We’re having a good time,’’ he said.

‘‘Mom’s asleep.’’ She was, in fact, snoring faintly. Or maybe it was the dog with its pushed in nose.

‘‘She’s enjoying herself. I can tell,’’ her father insisted. ‘‘Look, she’s smiling.’’

Something resembling a smile rested on her face, not so much on the lips themselves or the eyes, which were shut, but an internal facelift. Trish handed her father the frozen yogurt and spoon.

‘‘Just try to keep it down,’’ she said, kissing him on the cheek as if he were some stubborn teenager. ‘‘We don’t want the neighbors to call the cops.’’

The incongruous image of her parents busted by the cops made her laugh out loud. She felt bad suddenly for having been so surly. She tucked the sheet more precisely under her mother’s chin, brushing away the crumbs. Maybe tomorrow evening they could all smoke a joint and play Monopoly together into the wee hours.

What happened after that was unbelievable. Her parents had slipped through some portal in time and shut the door behind them, slammed the door in her face. She could see that her presence perturbed them since, in their universe, she hadn’t yet been born. They looked at her as if she were some gate-crasher from the future, making false claims upon them. A deluded lunatic, some poor woman on a bad acid trip who claimed she was their thirty-one-year-old daughter. How absurd. They didn’t even trust anyone over thirty! Every day while her father was at the office, her mother dozed, read a bit, dozed, watched Oprah and CNN, and dozed. On schedule, Trish administered the pills, spoonfuls of broth, and sponge baths, all the while generating a steady beam of bright light chatter—verbal Muzak. Her mother didn’t say much. She seemed to be in a state of suspended animation, saving herself for the evening.

It was like a myth, a fairy tale. The nocturnal transformation from beast to beauty, or in this instance, from death to life. In the evenings, after dinner, her parents would hole up together in the den. They would smoke dope and listen to old albums until long past what used to be their sensible bedtimes. The Doors; Joni Mitchell; Santana; Neil Young; Elton John; the Rolling Stones; Crosby, Stills & Nash. Her father played DJ. He didn’t often play an entire album. Mostly he played favorite cuts—her requests—as if he were always aware that time was short, that they had to make the most of it. He prided himself on his delicate surgical touch, plucking up the arm of the stereo without scratching the vinyl, at the precise break between songs. If he blew it, if his timing was off, he let the next song play all the way through, too polite to interrupt.

As she listened, her mother ate. Her cravings reverted back to the Grad Student Budget Diet of their early marriage: Kraft macaroni and cheese, peanut butter and Ritz crackers, instant mashed potatoes. Trish would find the dishes in the sink the next morning like a small pile of bones.

Her parents didn’t shut the door of the den. But a DO NOT DISTURB sign may as well have been dangling from the doorknob. At least that’s how she felt. Like a chambermaid waiting to change the sheets or pick up the night’s accumulation of trash. She couldn’t help but feel a bit miffed. Here she had put her own life, fifteen hundred miles away, such as it was, on hold in order to be there for them, and where were the? Where were her parents?

Through the open door she had glimpsed a scene that was too weird: her father wearing the expensive long brown wig he’d bought for his wife before she started chemotherapy. He had driven all the way to the best wig shop in St. Louis, recommended by the receptionist at the oncologist’s office. The wig lady assured him that it could be cut and styled to taste, but her mother didn’t like the wig period. She held it by her fingertips as if it were roadkill. It made her scalp itch. It felt like a Halloween costume. The wig had been banished to the Styrofoam head in the back of her closet. Until the evening that her father donned the wig and fashioned a headband out of a curtain tieback. When Trish happened to walk by the den, he was leaping around playing air guitar to Purple Haze, and her mother was laughing what sounded like a genuine as opposed to obligatory laugh. Trish had paused by the open door, poised on the brink of delight—but something about it undid her. Maybe because it felt like none of her business.

‘‘None of your beeswax,’’ her mother used to tell her when she was young and nosey, before she hit adolescence and totally lost interest in her parents’ lives. Once, rummaging through the bureau where her mother kept balled-up pantyhose, nestled together like a litter of tan kittens, Trish had unearthed a blue plastic case, an oversize compact. But instead of powder it contained an odd white dome like nothing she’d ever seen before. She couldn’t imagine what it was for. It seemed as mysterious and alien as some doll-sized flying saucer that had landed in her mother’s top drawer from outer space. Despite her curiosity, she didn’t ask. The thing seemed to radiate top secrecy. None of your beeswax might as well have been engraved on its blue plastic cover.

Her brother seemed unfazed by their parents’ behavior. Not the least bit hurt. Naturally. Nothing bothered him. Or if it did, he sat on his zafu, his little black whoopee cushion, until he managed to ‘‘put it all down.’’ All that monkey mind. All that ego. All those shrill inner voices shouting, ‘‘Watch me, Mommy, watch me!’’ His head seemed to rest more lightly, to be less of a burden on his neck than other people’s heads. She would sometimes stare at his skull when he was at the sink washing dishes or making himself a sandwich, imagining she could see the emptiness inside, like a spacious white cupboard. Her own mind looked like a giant garage sale, cluttered with useless, unattractive items that no one else wanted either. Not even for a quarter or a dime. Especially now, since the divorce, her mind was a rat’s nest of ugly thoughts. Or unskillful means, as Carlos referred to those scuttling vermin of anger, envy, greed, jealousy, self-pity, and more self-pity.

She had called him in a suicidal funk the night that Jeffrey rented a U-Haul and moved out his stuff. Carlos had driven across the bay through hellish traffic to be with her. In the morning when she was less hysterical, he had tried to teach her to ‘‘sit.’’

Every morning for maybe a week she ‘‘sat’’ as instructed. Half an hour, sometimes only twenty minutes. She arranged a small altar in the corner of the bedroom formerly occupied by Jeffrey’s pricey mountain bike. For the first few days she sat as if her life depended on it, as Carlos had intimated it did. But except for the rare merciful moments when the mental screen went dark—we are experiencing technical difficulties, stay tuned—the home movies played back to back, annoyingly dubbed, an endless out-of-sync voice-over yammering the same things over and over, as if her own mind thought she was too stupid to get it.

When her brother asked her how it was going, she’d said okay, but he could tell she was lying. So he invited her up to the wine country to a trendy new restaurant she had once expressed interest in trying back in the days when she was part of a couple who enjoyed (she’d thought) taking leisurely Sunday excursions. The food had consisted of a half dozen visually stunning, flavorfully complex courses—like tiny edible puzzles—but she had drunk too much expensive wine to savor any of it. She knew that as Carlos paid the astronomical bill he had to be converting it into llamas and water buffalos and donkeys for Third World villages, but he smiled at her graciously, as if it were money well spent. For her birthday the year before Carlos had sent her a gift card from the World Ark Foundation thanking her for her charitable contribution of a Filipino water buffalo ($250). And the following Christmas she’d received a similar gift card from a similar foundation thanking her for her ($300) charitable contribution used to purchase eyeglasses for children in Tibet.

When she remembered his kindness toward her on that evening—he hadn’t even drunk any of the expensive wine himself— she felt bad about resenting him. Back in California, although they didn’t see each other all that frequently, they were almost like friends. But she did resent the fact that he seemed to have been granted special access. After their mother’s midday medication, he would sit with her for a while, until she dozed off. Sometimes he would play one of the old Ravi Shankar albums he’d discovered among their stacks of oldies and rub her feet. Or chant in Japanese, beating some old gourd with a stick. The couple of times Trish had tried to join them she felt like a fifth wheel. ‘‘Just relax,’’ Carlos had told her when she complained about it later. ‘‘You’re trying too hard.’’

‘‘To do what?’’

‘‘Good question.’’ He gave her that look she couldn’t stand, as if he were a Zen master posing the $64,000 koan.

At the expensive restaurant in Napa, Carlos had pointed out that the Chinese character for ‘‘crisis’’ was the same as for ‘‘opportunity.’’ (A fact that she already knew, didn’t everyone?). ‘‘So why don’t they call it the Opportunity Hotline instead of the Crisis Hot-line?’’ she’d snapped.

Their father lost weight. For years his usual home attire had been khaki Dockers, but overnight he had unearthed some threadbare droopy-ass jeans from god-knows-where. Inside the pocket he found a well-washed dollar bill and a ticket stub to Love Story. May 20, 1970. A major archeological find. When he showed the stub to their mother, she remembered the night. It was the first movie they had gone out to see since Carl had been born six months earlier. Their downstairs neighbor, a gung ho grad student in early childhood development, had been eager to babysit, even though the baby was colicky. ‘‘Don’t worry about us,’’ the sitter told them, ‘‘have fun!’’ They went to Pizza Haven for dinner, shared a pitcher of beer, went to the movie, cried, bumped into some friends coming out of the theater, and went to the bar next door, where they all made fun of the movie. They made a list on a napkin: Love is never having to . . . Less witty, more silly as the list went on. Love is never having to say, ‘‘You’re hogging all the covers.’’ Love is never having to say, ‘‘I knew you were going to say that.’’ Even the waitress contributed one: Love is never having to say, ‘‘So, was she a better fuck than me?’’ They wrote it down to be nice but felt embarrassed because she was obviously so bitter. They left her a big tip.

Along with the blue jeans, her father found a black Spanish shawl with vibrant embroidered roses he draped over his wife’s shoulders. She had bought it in some Spanish village the summer they flitted across borders with their Eurail passes. Trish had pored over the photo album many times, imagining bumping into this young picture-perfect American couple on the train to Amsterdam or Barcelona, sharing their sack of bread and cheese and oranges, feeling this odd pang of loss when they all disembarked and went their separate ways.

One evening through the half-open door she saw them dancing. Or, rather, her father whirling her mother around to ‘‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’’ like a rag doll. Worse. The horrific image flashed through her head of a Nazi guard dancing with one of those skin-and-bones concentration camp prisoners in old black-and-white documentary footage. It was a terrible thing to think, even for a moment, and she felt guilty. Later that night, by way of expiation, she found herself describing it long distance to her best friend, Lauren, in soft focus, like something out of an old Fred Astaire– Ginger Rogers movie.

‘‘It sounds so tender,’’ Lauren said, choking up, ‘‘like they’re on their second honeymoon. Sort of. I mean I know it must be’’—she faded out—‘‘so poignant.’’

‘‘It is,’’ Trish agreed, then couldn’t help herself. ‘‘Gruesomely poignant, you could say. Ghoulishly romantic. Terminally tender.’’

Trish could hear Lauren biting her tongue fifteen hundred miles away. ‘‘I know how it sounds. It sounds sweet. But it’s spooky,’’ Trish insisted. ‘‘And I’m sure Elisabeth Kübler-Ross would agree with me.’’

‘‘You sound pissed off. What are you so pissed off at?’’

Trish shrugged. She wanted to ask if Lauren had bumped into Jeffrey in the almost-a-month since she had been gone. Lauren and Will lived just a couple blocks away. They all frequented the same strip of gourmet shops along College Avenue with their pavilions of olives-from-around-the-world and esoteric cheeses, the Magic Kingdom of food. But while she was debating whether she really wanted to know, Lauren asked, ‘‘So what does Carlos think?’’

‘‘About . . .?’’

‘‘Your parents, your father. Everything.’’

‘‘What do you think he thinks? He’s their pusher. He’s the one who started it all. He, no doubt, thinks it’s far out. Groovy.’’ She sighed. From downstairs she heard her father calling her. She dragged the phone to the landing. He was down below, staring with a wistful expression at a bowl of dry granola cupped between his two hands, like a monk’s begging bowl.

‘‘We’re out of milk,’’ he said. As if he couldn’t quite believe it all came to this, in the end, this small dry bowl of cereal.

She turned around, retreated back inside her room with the telephone, and shut the door.

At the end, the last couple of days, her mother seemed to leave her body for increasingly longer intervals, like a baby bird flying away from its nest—short practice hops followed by longer, more distant flights. Carlos sat by her side sliding ice chips between her dry lips like a mother bird. It was hard to see her go, hard to watch her return. She had made it clear in a living will: no extreme measures. It appeared to take more will to die than to live, which seemed unfair. Trish thought it should be easier than this. She couldn’t tell if it was the mind clinging to the body or the body clinging to the mind. Her mother came and went. Her brother, who had seen it all before, said it was always the same and always different—same movie, different movie theater. It sounded cynical, but he wasn’t. She was, suddenly, glad he was there. She was glad she wasn’t the only child. It seemed somehow as if they were splitting the grief, fifty-fifty.

Their father had bowed out. He was somewhere else. Just as stoned as their mother. He sat on the back porch, taking long tokes off needle-thin joints he rolled with methodical precision. Every couple hours or so he would appear in the doorway of the den for a silent moment and then disappear again. Pacing. Pacing. The dog would pace along behind him. If her father turned abruptly, they would collide, and Tommy Tune would yelp with aggrieved innocence until her father apologized with a Milk-Bone or Beggin’ Strip.

‘‘That dog’s a real con artist,’’ Trish said, glaring. The dog pissed her off. It seemed somehow to be taking advantage of a bad situation.

‘‘He’s in a strange place. He’s feeling insecure,’’ her father, the dog whisperer, explained. ‘‘Aren’t you, buddy?’’ He stooped over and scratched the dog under his matted neck.

Trish didn’t think the dog felt the least bit insecure. He seemed completely on top of it, ever attuned to the main chance. To avoid Trish’s scowl as he reached into the canister of dog treats, her father began stuffing his pockets. His old jeans reeked of fake bacon.

A week earlier he had stopped going into the office. Trish imagined that his colleagues pictured him sitting at his wife’s bedside, hovering attentively. But during the day he took to taking long rambles on the Katy Trail. He left Tommy Tune at home because the stubby, overfed dog couldn’t keep up. The Labradors and other retrievers he passed on the trail lunged toward him to sniff his pockets as their owners wrestled desperately with the leashes.

Trish knew this because the day before her mother died her father came home muddy and shaken. An unleashed mutt—part pit bull, her father insisted—had knocked him over and ripped open his pocket. In the laundry room he stripped down to his boxers and threw his muddy clothes in the washing machine. After the load was dry, Trish saw him sitting on the back porch with a needle and thread, intent upon mending the ragged pocket of his jeans. She didn’t even know he knew how to sew. He seemed surprisingly adept.

‘‘Dr. Grealey is leaving now,’’ she told her father. ‘‘Do you want to talk with her?’’

Her father set aside his mending and walked to the foyer where the doctor was standing, holding her black bag. She was a pleasant-looking middle-aged woman, with the air of a lay nun—a no-fuss haircut and sensible shoes. They were as grateful to her as they could be under the circumstances. Trish felt almost sorry for her standing there holding her empty black bag of tricks, steeling herself to talk to the husband.

Trish didn’t know what the doctor said to him, but for the first time in a while her father went into the den and sat by his wife’s bed, watching her sleep, if that’s what you could call it. He covered her hand on the covers with his own but didn’t seem to look at her. He seemed to be looking out the window. The crates of old albums had been shoved under the bed. After a few minutes, he picked up one of the Buddhist books on the end table, glanced through it, and slammed the book shut. He shook his head. He sighed. He cleared his throat and sighed again. He stood up. Then he caught sight of Trish standing there just outside the door frame and frowned. ‘‘Don’t say it,’’ he said.

‘‘What?’’

‘‘Whatever it is you’re thinking about me. I feel bad enough.’’ He brushed past her on his way out of the room.

‘‘I wasn’t thinking anything,’’ Trish called after him in the tone of voice of someone who has been falsely accused—even though he was right. She was thinking that if she were the one dying she would hope for something more from her husband than this. She would hope that after thirty-five years of marriage he would not sit there tongue-tied, as if they were on an awkward first date. For maybe the first time she was glad that Jeffrey had left her now. He clearly would not have been able to rise to the occasion. At least she still had time. They always spoke of finding your ‘‘life partner.’’ That was easy, she saw now, compared to finding your death partner. She crossed the room and stood over her mother. She listened to her ragged syncopated breathing. She watched her face. She tried to read her expression, to memorize it. Her mother’s eyelids twitched. Her mouth flinched. She moaned. She didn’t seem at peace. It would require some willful self-deception to conclude that she was at peace. But, on the other hand, she didn’t appear to be suffering either. That was the good news. She just seemed to be doing what she was doing. And what she was doing appeared to be so all-consuming that no room was left over to feel one way or the other about it. Nothing extra, the Buddhists said. She hadn’t known what that meant before. But here it was. Or, rather, wasn’t.

Her brother was the one who saw their mother die. Trish was sitting there right beside him in the other dining room chair they had pulled up to the bed. She slumped and fidgeted while Carlos sat still, his back straight as a T-square from all those hours on the zafu. She was afraid if she sat in the plush armchair she would fall asleep. Earlier their mother’s breathing had been labored, as if she were climbing a steep hill behind her closed eyelids. But with the latest dose of morphine she seemed to be back on level ground. Carlos was rubbing her feet. Trish was sitting right there—she wasn’t reading or watching television or filing her nails—but she didn’t see it happen. Afterward she kept trying to remember precisely what she’d been doing, where her mind was, how she couldn’t have seen it for herself—her mother’s last breath. Why hadn’t she been more tuned in? She was sitting right there for chrissakes. She felt insensitive, not finely enough calibrated to the subtleties of life and death. As if it would have taken a gunshot or a heavy blow to the skull to snap her attention back from wherever it had strayed. She had fished an ice chip out of the dish on the nightstand and was reaching over to slip it into her mother’s mouth when Carlos arrested her arm in midair. ‘‘She’s gone,’’ he said. ‘‘She doesn’t need anything.’’

Trish stared at him. She couldn’t believe it. That was it? she felt like crying out. After all this time? She looked at her wristwatch,

11:56 a.m. A bright hot morning, just before lunchtime. People would be lining up at drive-thru windows at McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell. Mothers in kitchens would be opening cans of SpaghettiOs for their kids. Co-workers would be talking shop over extravagant salads at trendy cafes. It was as if her watch had stopped but everyone else’s kept ticking away.

Her brother stood up. He said something about phone calls to make. He walked briskly out of the room. She envied his sense of mission. She couldn’t think of a single thing she needed to do at this moment. Their father was out somewhere, on one of his rambles. It pissed her off. She imagined paging the woods, as at an airport:

Mitchell Ritchie please go to the nearest white courtesy telephone. Your wife is dead. Mitchell Ritchie please go . . . A white courtesy phone struck her as the perfect medium for receiving news of death.

She walked upstairs to her bedroom and fished out of her shoulder bag the prayer beads the taxi driver had given her at the airport a month earlier. They smelled faintly of sandalwood as she pressed them to her nose. And possibly a whiff of curry, although that might have been her imagination. She remembered Gramma Ritchie kneading her crystal rosary beads in times of crisis. But their own parents, lapsed Catholics both, had never taken them to any church. The prayer beads seemed a dramatic stage prop— who was she acting for?—but no, she told herself, not really. It wasn’t the prayer beads themselves so much as the memory of the cab driver’s ready sympathy, his generous willingness to throw everyone’s grief into the same global stewpot—First World, Third World, Hindu, Christian—no passport required. BYOB. Bring your own bowl.

She thought of her father the other night, standing below her on the landing, staring down at his dry bowl of cereal. His face floated toward her with sudden binocular-like clarity. Cold, hungry, lost. Pitiful as a stray cat. Why hadn’t she offered to run out for a carton of milk? She looked again at her watch. Maybe she could drive to the market and be back before he returned from his walk.

It is the only thing she can think to do.

She grabbed her mother’s car keys from the bowl on the kitchen counter next to where her brother was talking on the phone. Making arrangements. He held up his index finger signaling for her to wait as she walked past him to the garage door. She thought of Shakyamuni holding up a single flower to show the Buddha that he understood what he was saying, the only one in the vast crowd. She couldn’t precisely remember what it was the Buddha had been saying; all that had stuck with her was the bit about Shakyamuni holding up the flower—like the smartest kid in the class raising his hand in the back row—and being enlightened on the spot. Or like some hippie flower-child poster: Make Love Not War. She pantomimed driving and pointed to the empty carton of milk poking out of the trashcan. Carlos frowned and wagged his index finger as if to say he had something urgent to tell her, but she slipped through the door as if she had no time to wait.

She had driven two blocks on automatic pilot, barely aware of the fact that she was in the car, in motion, when she heard a horn toot and saw her father passing her with a limp little salute, his silver Camry headed toward home. At the stop sign she slumped over the steering wheel, pressing her forehead against the hard plastic rim. She wasn’t that close to her mother. For the past decade they had talked for maybe fifteen minutes on Sunday morning, a quick verbal frisk, and spent no more than a week or so together in any given year. Even so, she couldn’t imagine herself without a mother. Her mother had conceived her and it was inconceivable being without a mother. Hanging on the wall of his bedroom in Sonoma, her brother has these two framed calligraphy koans. One says, Where were you before you were born? The other, What does your original face look like?

Her father’s memory was pathetic, insulting, as if he had been on one long business trip while they were growing up. Sometimes, looking through old photo albums, he’d confuse their baby pictures, even though Carlos was three years older and a boy. Their father could never remember the names of their friends. In first grade she had been best friends, inseparable, with a girl named Janine, and since then her father had referred to all her friends as Janine. The generic best friend. He was a loving, generous father, but distracted, inattentive to detail. Her mother, like most mothers, had always been the family archivist, her side of the closet crowded with cartons of finger-painted portraits, snippets of silken baby hair, gilded macaroni masterpieces, crayoned Mother’s Day cards, poster paint handprints and footprints, report cards, diplomas, birth certificates, a plaster arm cast signed by Carlos’s fifth-grade class. Trish’s petrified black rubber retainer. How gross was that? Who else would ever preserve such a thing? Who else would ever know her original face?

Sighing, she pictured her father sailing into the garage, the door gliding shut behind him—whereupon the screen goes blank as he walks into the kitchen. She is just as glad not to be there.

The digital clock on the dashboard of her mother’s car, which still smelled vaguely of Opium—her mother’s favorite perfume— reads 12:10. Only 10:10 in California. She pictures her ex-husband sitting at his desk, talking on the phone, unaware that an earthquake has just struck her life, and for the first time she doesn’t wish him dead. She knows how much he liked her mother. He always sent her a bottle of Opium for her birthday. Then, for some reason—Do they grow poppies in Tibet? —she finds herself wondering what time it is in Lhasa—the rooftop of the world—and she pictures a smiling, severely myopic round-faced child, a young Dalai Lama–type, wearing his new gold-rimmed eyeglasses for the very first time, amazed by the beauty of his mother’s face.

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