The door to his mother’s room was open wide. A CNA was standing next to the bed. He heard his mother’s three-pack-a-day voice loud and clear. The CNA could too, and by the way her neck and shoulders were knotted up, she didn’t like what she was hearing.
“I’ve been pushing that ‘call’ button for forty-five minutes. You girls up there with ya nose buried in a phone while I’m sitting in piss. I’ve pissed myself. Do you know how that feels? Do you understand that? I’m sitting here in a puddle of piss.” She paused to take a deep hit of oxygen from her nasal cannula. “No, you don’t, but don’t worry, one day you will. You all cute and pretty now but one day you gonna be right here like I am and I hope somebody lets you sit in your own piss like your privates in a stew,” she said.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Montage. We just so short-staffed today,” the CNA said. She sounded genuinely apologetic. That was a mistake. Ella was like a lioness on the Serengeti. She could sense weakness.
“Oh, I’m sorry, chile. You’re short-staffed. I’ll try to die more quietly,” Ella said.
The CNA made a wet strangled noise and rushed out of the room. She brushed past Beauregard mumbling to herself. He caught the words “miserable” and “witch.”
“Hey, Mama,” Beauregard said. He stepped just inside the door.
Ella appraised him from top to bottom with a gentle flick of her eyes. “You getting skinny. I never thought that girl knew how to cook,” she said.
“Kia cooks just fine, Mama. How you feeling?”
“Ha! I’m dying. Other than that, I’m feeling great,” she said.
Beauregard inched farther into the room. “You ain’t going nowhere,” he said.
“Get my cigarettes out that drawer,” she said.
“Mama, you don’t need them cigarettes. Didn’t you just say you was dying?”
“Yeah, so a cigarette ain’t gonna hurt nothing,” Ella said.
“Have you been smoking with your oxygen on? You know you could blow this place up, right?” Beauregard asked.
His mother shrugged. “I probably be doing most of the people here a favor,” she said. Beauregard had to chuckle at that one. That was the thing about his mother. She could be emotionally manipulative one minute then making you laugh the next. It was like getting hit in the face with a pie that had a padlock in it. When he was a kid, she had combined that acerbic wit with her looks to pretty much get whatever she wanted. All children think their mother is beautiful, but Beauregard had noticed fairly early on that other people thought his mother was beautiful too. Long coal black hair like an oil slick ran down her back to her waist. Skin the color of coffee with too much cream told the story of her varied ancestry. Her light gray irises gave her almond-shaped eyes an otherworldly appearance.
Cashiers always seemed to have extra change if she was short at the grocery store. Cops always seemed to give her a warning even if she was doing the speed of light through a school zone. People always seemed to want to do what Ella Montage told them to do. Even if she was telling them to go fuck themselves. Everybody except his Daddy. She once told him that his father was the only man to ever put her in her place.
“I loved him for it. Hated him too,” she would say between puffs on her omnipresent dark brown More cigarette. He could remember sitting on her lap as she told him over and over again how they met. He never got fairy tales as a kid. He got Sturm and Drang epics set against the backdrop of sultry country nights. Eventually he realized his mother considered it some kind of weird therapy. She had her very own captive eight-year-old psychologist.
The cancer and its subsequent treatments had taken her hair first. She wore a black scarf now. Then it withered her skin. The stoma in her throat stared at him like the mouth of some strange parasite. A lamprey eel that was trying to crawl out of her neck. Only the gray eyes remained untouched. So light they sometimes appeared blue. Smart eyes that never forgot anything they ever saw. And they never let you forget it either.
“Mama, why didn’t you tell me about this policy?”
Ella fixed those cool eyes on him. “Because it wasn’t none of your damn business.”
Ella stretched her thin arm out to the drawer beside her bed and pulled out a pack of More cigarettes and a lighter. She lit one up and inhaled deeply. A thin trail of smoke leaked out of the hole in her throat and encircled her head like a dirty halo. Beauregard rubbed his hand over his face. A long sigh hissed out of his mouth.
“Mama, that policy counts as an asset. That asset counts against your Medicaid. Now you’re behind on your payments to the nursing home. Do you hear what I’m saying? They talking about kicking you out of here,” he said.
“And you and Little Miss Big Booty don’t want me dirtying up your fancy double-wide, right? You know she never brings the boys up here to see me? I’ve seen Ariel more than I’ve seen Darren and Javon and her mama don’t even like black people anymore,” Ella said. Beauregard grabbed a metal chair from the corner and sat down close to his mother’s bed.
“That ain’t just on Kia. We’ve both been real busy and I’m sorry for that. Mama, look, you know I asked you when you first got sick to come live with us. You said no. You said you didn’t want to live under my roof, under my rules. ‘What it look like, a mother letting her child tell her what to do?’ Remember saying that? Now it’s just … you need a lot of help now. More than we can give you.” He reached out and touched his mother’s free hand. The skin felt like crepe paper. Ella took another drag on her cigarette and moved her hand to her lap.
“You said it but you didn’t mean it,” she said. Her voice was a low sharp rasp. Beauregard leaned back in the chair and stared up at the acoustical tiles in the ceiling. He’d gone down this particular road a thousand times over the years. He didn’t need a map or a signpost to see where it was headed.
“Mama, we going to have to get rid of that policy. Ain’t no way around that because you ain’t got anywhere else to go,” Beauregard said. Ella took another long deep drag off her cigarette.
“If your Daddy was here, I wouldn’t need to be in no nursing home. If he hadn’t walked out on me when I needed him the most I wouldn’t be here sitting in my own piss. I’d be in my own house with my own husband. But when it came to handling his responsibilities we both know Anthony Montage was about as useful as a white crayon, don’t we?” Ella asked. Beauregard let the question hang in the air between them.
“He left me too, Mama,” he said. His deep baritone had dropped four octaves. The words seemed to emanate from his chest, not his mouth. If Ella heard him she wasn’t in the mood to acknowledge it.
“He should have never walked out on me. Goddamn black bastard. He promised me he would always take care of me,” Ella mumbled. Beauregard saw her eyes begin to glisten. He stood up and put the chair back.
“I gotta go, Mama,” he said. Ella waved her cigarette toward the door.
Beauregard walked out of the room, down the hall and out of the nursing home. He would have to ask Mrs. Talbot how his mother was getting cigarettes. He couldn’t stand watching her smoke. It didn’t revolt him. He just couldn’t stand watching her do that to herself. He was more disturbed by her eyes welling up with tears. He could count on one hand how many times he’d actually seen his mother cry. She gave up her tears as sparingly as she gave out compliments. If she was weeping, she was in terrible pain. Either spiritually or physically or both. Ella Montage was not an easy woman to love but seeing the reality of her fragility pierced him in places that were soft and frightened. It was like someone had shot him in the stomach then shoved their thumb in the hole.