Everything Happens Today by Jesse Browner Read Free Book Online Page A

mom.”
    â€œWhat is it, honey?”
    â€œOh mom, I don’t know. I . . . ”
    â€œOnly I’m a little hungry. Can you bring me some pudding?”
    â€œDidn’t Nora already make you breakfast?”
    â€œNo she did not, the little beast.”
    â€œShe didn’t make you breakfast?”
    â€œWes, do I have to tell you? She didn’t make me breakfast, damn it.”
    â€œOkay, okay, keep yer panties on. I’ll take care of it. Can I turn the light on for a minute?”
    â€œIt hurts my eyes.”
    â€œJust for a minute. You can close them. I want to check your skin.”
    â€œGo ahead.”
    Wes stood up and turned to the bedside lamp and walked straight into the support strut of his mother’s electric lifter. It didn’t hurt but Wes swore at the machine under his breath. It was a kind of swing set straddling the bed, but instead of swings it had a nylon sling, like the kind that are lowered from helicopters in rescue operations. In theory, Wes’s mother could roll to the side, position the sling beneath her buttocks, press a button and rise and slide to her wheelchair besides the bed. The idea was to make her feel independent, but in fact she found it almost impossible to position the sling properly beneath her and hadn’t used it for months. Wes and Nora had tried playing on it when she was in the hospital, but it had been less than fun. It was only kept around in anticipation of the day when she could no longer walk herself to the bathroom at all, even when assisted by one of her children, and that was why Wes hated it with its gunmetal finish and bright yellow warning labels ringed in orange. The insurance rep had told them, sitting around the dining room table, that it was cheaper to leave it there than to dismantle and remove it, only to have to reinstall it six months later.
    Wes switched on the lamp and returned to his mother’s side. Her face could be a little frightening to look at under its corona of colorless wisps, but Wes rarely noticed because it had been such a gradual decline. He had only the vaguest mem­ories of her as a healthy woman—a beach somewhere, where she had leaned back against her elbow and he could see her eyes smiling behind her sunglasses; some walks to school, with singing and hand-holding; a bright office in midtown, where she designed book jackets on enormous computer monitors and taught him how to use the software to make digital collages. He seemed to remember that she’d been gregarious, that she’d worn colorful scarves on her head, knotted at the nape, that she cried watching
E.T.
That she had played show tunes on the upright downstairs. It was odd how little he remembered, given that the earliest symptoms of illness had not manifested themselves until Wes was seven or eight; he supposed his mind must have packed all those memories away somewhere. It was as if she had always been sick. Nobody ever talked about her getting better or anything like that. It was only on the rare occasion when he joined Nora in her intense scrutinies of the family photo albums, the only evidence that their mother had ever been anything but a diminished invalid, that the damage stood out in stark contrast. Deeply sunken eyes the color of aged porcelain rhimed with red, grey lips collapsed upon themselves, restless liverish tongue always licking and seeking—Wes noted it all briefly with alarm, then allowed it to fade from consciousness. Now, under the lamplight, his only interest was in the color of her skin. The optic neuritis that had recently attacked her one good eye had been treated with massive doses of steroids, which had dyed her skin yellow. It was still as dry and transparent as tracing paper, but it seemed to have purged itself of most of the toxins, although it was hard to tell in this light. Wes kissed her on the cheek, switched off the lamp and leaned back against the raised segment of the mattress.
    She