It takes a bit for me to warm up to her. Mom wanted cigarettes, and that morning on the phone she also asked me to buy a pack for this woman here I don’t know. Mom said the woman had cash, that she’d pay me. But during our call Mom slipped up, said the woman didn’t have the money yet, that she was waiting for her friend to show up who owed her. I wasn’t playing that game, I told my mother.

“I’m so tired,” my mother says. “I want to sleep, but I can’t.”

“I’m not even here,” I say, starting to warm up to her.

Mom looks at me, then smiles. “Shut up,” she says.

“You’re so tired I’m a hallucination,” I say. I smile a little.

She’s laughing now. She lost all her teeth years ago, but she has dentures. Top only. She lost the bottom at a Dysart’s Restaurant last year, asked me to call them, which I did, and I asked if they found a pair at the back table. That was where she’d been sitting, she told me, next to an oil painting of green olives in a brown bowl. They didn’t find any teeth.

I point at the two packs I brought her. “You’re going to reach for those cigarettes later,” I tell her, “thinking they’re there, but they’re not. I never even brought them.”

I’m laughing now.

“Stop that,” Mom says. She’s laughing.

“Then I’ll call you tonight,” I say, “and ask if you need those cigarettes.”

That does it, and we’re both laughing hard. It feels good to laugh with her, feels like it scrapes the dark and grimy walls inside me.

When we’re done laughing she says I’m a shit. “Always were,” she says.

I wipe my eyes of laughing tears and then bring my coffee mug to my lips. It’s still hot, and so I blow on it and then set it back down. When I do, Mom’s getting up.

“I’m a little chilly,” she says. She hasn’t even smoked yet.

Inside, we sit across from each other at the long kitchen table. An old man in a tan sweater is sitting there too, but at the end. He’s eating a sandwich, hands shaking, and with each bite, his sleeve slides down his wrist to reveal a gold watch. He doesn’t talk to us, doesn’t look at us, and for a moment—a moment, a single tick of his watch—he becomes familiar. Do I know you, I want to ask. Perhaps he was here the last time I visited.

That woman who wanted cigarettes is in the living room, watching The Maury Show, fidgeting with her purple lighter. I wonder if she’s mad at me because I didn’t get her any cigarettes.