It occurred to me that I was now almost twice as old as my mother had been when she left home. I thought of how I would have felt had I been in her place, knowing as little as I did about the ways of the world. Would I have understood how beauty made one both powerful and vulnerable? Would I have been more wary? How jealously did she guard her virtue before she met my father? How wily and persuasive had he been? Or was it just the time and the place?

Not even Sunny could have said for certain what was going through my mother’s mind in those days. All I had to hold on to were memories of her: softly singing to me at bedtime when I was small, or the nights she came home stumble-drunk and snuggled up next to me, clinging to me like I was the only thing in the world that mattered to her.

My mother spent most of the hours I sat in that room sleeping, peaceful but too weary, I hoped, to think of what would soon come. I had little time alone with her: nurses came and went; Jim sat on the other side of the bed, holding my mother’s hand or slouching in the corner chair, staring off toward the window, falling into fitful sleep here and there and then waking with a start to ensure that my mother did not go while he was unconscious.

Every day, Dolly was impatient for me to finish the painting. She felt somehow that my work was time taken from her. I told her I’d promised her father.

“I thought he wasn’t your daddy,” she said.

“He’s paying me a lot of money,” I said.

“For painting a picture?”

One afternoon, when I was nearly finished with the portrait, my mother sent the nurse out of the room.

“Let me see,” she said.

I lifted the canvas and turned it around. I had worked my way from the eyes outward, so that the canvas surrounding her head and shoulders was still blank.

“Look at me,” she said. “Inside a cloud.”

I smiled. “Do you like it?” I asked.

She nodded. “Come sit with me.”

I put the painting back on the easel and walked over to the bed. She reached up with a frail hand to my shoulder and pulled me down to lie beside her.

“You’ll always be my baby,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”

She was barely conscious when she said it. Perhaps she was dreaming, or hallucinating. It made no difference. And because I knew she could not possibly hear or feel or remember, I let go, and I wept.

The next Saturday, my mother died in her sleep.