“You have to come downtown,” I said.

She looked at Birdie and then paced to the window to look out.

“Are you out of your fucking mind? Is someone here?”

“It’s just me. But we need to take care of the house. I need you to put it in my name so I can have everything turned back on.”

“Oh,” she said, and her arms dropped. “I get it.” Her face had a sweaty film that said she was an hour or so out of a high. “I’m just going to put you in charge,” she said.

“Only on paper,” I said. I heard Birdie scrape her chair on the floor and come to look out the window, but I held her back at arm’s length.

“What are we going to do,” she said to me, nodding at Birdie, “once it’s all yours?”

I wanted to remind her that she’d been threatening to run for years.

“It’s just so I can take over the payments,” I said.

“You want to make the payments?” she said. “Make them. It’s about time you contributed.”

I bit my tongue. I had been doing everything for her for years. “They need the payment in full,” I said. “I can’t pay that much. If I put the house in my name, I can start over again at zero. I can fix this,” I said.

She took the edge of her skirt, which had been dragging on the floor and in the dirt outside, and rubbed it on her face, taking away some of the shine.

“What am I supposed to do with her?” she whispered to me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “What you always do with her.”

I wanted to die, driving the truck with my mother riding in the passenger seat. I thought this had become the picture of my life, me driving a shitty vehicle that wasn’t even mine, that sat a little crooked on its axle, like you were sliding off a hill, driving my mother around to appointments I couldn’t pay for. I was afraid to open the windows, and afraid not to because I wasn’t sure which was worse for the smell of her damp, unwashed body: blowing it around, or closing it up with the vents on. I stared straight ahead, and she sat like a pouting child, her arms crossed over her chest. I fidgeted with my fingers on the steering wheel the whole way there, picking at my nails, pulling off the cuticles until a fat bead of red blood appeared.

There was a paralegal at the table with Dan Sullivan, a young woman who smiled sweetly, but my mother would look only at a fixed point on the wall and refused to make eye contact or acknowledge anyone in the room. We were twenty-five minutes late.

Dan took the papers one by one from the paralegal and explained them to my mother slowly, in simple language.

“I’m not fucking retarded,” my mother said. Her brow was dripping, and she snatched a box of tissues from the middle of the table and blotted at her face.