RINGING THE FRONT DOORBELL IN A STATE OF SUCH ANXIETY, I am (absurdly) relieved when no one answers. I am carrying a red climber rose for my mother’s garden, gripped in my arms against my chest like a shield.

Katie has told me, probably Mom will be in her garden. If no one answers the door just go around to the back.

Mom had chemotherapy yesterday. She will be feeling the effects today. One of our young cousins is staying with her, looking after her until Katie can come over in the late afternoon.

Strange, unnerving, to walk around to the back of the little wood frame house at 111 Harrison Street which I have never seen before. Underfoot the grass is scruffy, gone partly to seed. All of the blinds at the windows have been pulled down. How like trespassing this feels, in a fairy tale in which the clueless young girl blunders into the forbidden and will regret it.

A mild shock, turning a corner of the house, and there is an ordinary backyard, a small plot of tilled soil, a few flowering plants, shrubs, and there, in splotched sunshine, seated in a canvas lawn chair with a straw hat partly covering her face—an older woman in loose-fitting clothes with white skin, delicate features like a smudged watercolor. My mother?

“Mom?—hello . . .”

Here is the true shock: my mother stares at me blinking rapidly, without seeming to recognize me. Then she smiles, stiffly.

“Mom? It’s Violet. I—I’m visiting Katie.”

Swallowing hard, for this is awkward. (Should I come to my mother, to embrace her? Take her hand? Kiss her? I am carrying the rosebush in my arms, and will set it down at her feet.)

“I—maybe Katie told you?—I’m staying with Katie at her place for—a few nights.”

My mother is beautiful!—that is my first impression.

Her skin seems translucent. Her mouth is thinner than I recall, but touched with lipstick, lightly. In the shadow of the straw hat, her eyes are large, luminous.

“Mom? It’s Violet.”

The thought occurs to me—She doesn’t know who I am.

“Aunt Lula? You have a visitor.”

A strapping big-thighed girl in bib overalls hurries out of the house to facilitate the visit. Evidently she is my cousin Trix whom I scarcely recall as a little girl, and Trix is trained as a nurse’s aide, staying with Aunt Lula whenever she’s needed.

“Aunt Lula? Look: somebody’s brought you a present.”

Foolishly I stammer there are more rosebushes in the car . . . for Mom’s garden.

Determined not to burst into tears and yet within a few seconds, I am weeping uncontrollably.

“Oh hey, Vi’let—it’s OK. Your mom is doing really well, there’s nothing to be sad about. Aunt Lula? See who’s here? It’s ‘Violet.’”