“Cold?” I said. “It’s worst in March, I think. You start hoping it’ll get better, but it doesn’t.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I was outside for an hour at Howard Beach. Some problem with the A downtown.”

She’d come all the way up from the city, saving money on a flight even though she had plenty to spare.

“You want some tea?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t.” She picked up the empty bottle from the table and squinted at the label. “She really needs both of us, Stella. She needs us at full capacity.”

“I needed to relax.”

“Relaxing is never a long-term solution.”

“It’s not a long-term situation, Mom.”

She set down the bottle abruptly. “Don’t talk like that,” she said. “At least not around me.”

She started collecting things from the floor, books and magazines, and piling them on the table. Her own living room was perfectly neat. Even the kitchen was spotless. That was how she lived. I could remember her getting angry at my father before work, storming out the front door, yelling, “Come on, Jay, your crap is all over the house.”

And I remember his reply: “I live here. My crap lives here.”

Now she frowned at the piles she was making, rearranging them.

“It’s been hard,” I said. “I’m no good at this.”

“At what?”

“At helping her get old, or stopping her from getting old, or whatever I’m supposed to be doing to help. It’s too much, you know? All this falling down, all her drugs, all her daydreams and her shitting and everything. She’s so skinny, Mom. You’ll see.”

Even in bed, lying down, swaddled like a baby in the direct line of her space heater, Grandma Lucy showed the skeletal lines of her decline. “Oh, Mother.” My mother sighed. “Look at you.”

Everything she noticed felt like blame: I can’t believe she lives like this, looking at the mess, and of course I’d been looking at it for months. What are all these drugs? she said. Where are the prescriptions? I couldn’t tell her because I didn’t know. Grandma Lucy had filled them herself a long time ago, or maybe given them to Juana, but she couldn’t remember the names when I asked. The bottles were empty in the cupboard, all of them jumbled. Well, this is no good, my mom said. No good at all.

She thought the whole place was depressing.

“She fixed up the inside how she likes,” I said. I’d been hating it for weeks, all the bright matching colors, their symmetries like sutures stitching up wounds. But now I felt defensive.

My mom suggested I take the weekend off. “I’m here now. I’ve got things covered.”

I saw her pulling up my sheets from the couch.

“You’re not sleeping here?” I said.

“I’m sleeping with her,” she said.

I couldn’t imagine my mother sharing a bed with anyone.

“And what am I supposed to do?” I said. “While you’re taking care of everything?”