The subjects which soothe her most are African violets, dogs, and Mexico. When we talk about these things I take the brush and brush her hair slowly, a stroking which also seems to steady her. I am good with the mad, at home out here on the edge of the world where the dying are, and I come closer to her as she is falling apart under my gaze, her hair coming loose even with the easy strokes of the brush. She begins a story which combines the elements that please her. She has bought a house in Mexico, just across the border, she says, in the hills above Nogales. She has told no one, and I must not tell anyone either, especially my father, who would prevent her from going. She will live there with her friend Alicia, who used to come once a week to scrub and dust; I don’t know how long it’s been since my mother’s seen Alicia, but everything has been planned: they will be happy in the new house, which will have a courtyard, and a garden, and in the kitchen with its blue-and-white tiled counters they will raise African violets, white ones. They will have a perfect dog, a German shepherd, devoted to them both, who will walk with them down the steep hill into the village, those occasional days when they must go to town. She would like me to bring her a white violet, and a book about dogs. She must prepare.

In truth I don’t look for these things; I think she won’t remember, and I am mad myself, that night, lurching, lost, driving around, terrified, coming back to sleep in the stillness and heaviness of my parents’ house, the swamp cooler on the roof humming over the darkened rooms, the familiar displays of my mother’s blue-and-white china—chipped, crazed stuff—dusty now, smudged with smoke and cobwebs. After she dies my father won’t let Alicia in the house because she might move something, put a platter or a pitcher back in the wrong place; every gesture my mother made, every arrangement of her collection, will seem to him precious. Outside in the dark, sleepless, I study the new houses crawling up the sides of the foothills, a brilliant scatter of mica chips, also blue and white, with little glimmers of amber. Behind me, in the house, scattered evidence of my mother’s illness: bedpan, oxygen tank, boxes and boxes of Miltown.

The next morning, sunlight on the mountains, the sky scrubbed pale, heat wavering up off the hospital parking lot. My mother says, “Did you bring me a white violet and the book about dogs?” I’d been sure she’d forget. I confess I haven’t. ”That’s all right,” she says, the last thing she’ll ever say to me. “It’s funny how so many things just don’t make a difference.”