212 LP: A Novel by Alafair Burke Page B

quickly as she could.
    Katie sat on the bed and watched as her mother slowly raised the glass to her lips with a quivering hand.
    “Don’t you…even..think…about grabbing…one of those…ridiculous children’s toys…on top of my icebox.”
    Katie had purchased a box of plastic straws for her mother four months earlier, but they still sat unopened on top of the refrigerator. “Those are for children,” her mother had said. “I start using one of those, and the next thing I know, you’ll be trying to feed me with a miniature spoon passed off as an airplane.”
    Katie noticed that her mother placed her right hand on her chest during the three-second gaps between words. She knew that the falter in her mother’s usually strong voice was the byproduct ofdoctors tinkering with her heart medication again. They’d assured Katie that the occasional skipped beat wasn’t itself a danger, but she could tell that the irregularities in something we all took for granted—our beating hearts—scared her mother, causing the pauses in her speech.
    None of this was easy for Katie’s mother. Phyllis Battle had always been a woman who had known what she wanted. When her first daughter, Barbara, had been killed in a car accident in 1974, she had known—and insisted to her husband—that they would adopt another, even though they had each already celebrated their fiftieth birthdays. And she had known—and insisted to her husband—that they would name the girl Katie, after the confident and independent woman who leaves Robert Redford behind in The Way We Were . And when her husband passed away ten years ago, leaving behind debts he had never mentioned to his wife, Phyllis had known—and insisted to her daughter, Katie—that she would continue to live in the family home alone.
    The highest hurdle Katie had ever faced had come a year ago when she told her mother she needed to move. For the first time, someone for once was insisting on something to Phyllis. Katie had eventually won that initial battle between the Battle women, but that didn’t mean her mother was going to forfeit what might remain of the war. No plastic drinking straws. No arts and crafts in the common room with the women whom her mother called the “pathetic old biddies.” None of the loose, maintenance-free cotton housedresses that were practically a uniform at Glen Forrest.
    And definitely no wheelchairs.
    “Mom, I know you don’t want to hear this, but another fall could be really bad.”
    “I can…take care…of myself.”
    “I know. But you’d find it’s a lot easier if you’d take advantage of some of the things they have here to help you, like a chair, Mom.”
    Katie leaned forward and rested her hand gently on top of her mother’s. At eighty-two years old, her mother had maintainedher full cognition and spirit, but her hand had never felt so thin and frail, her blue veins bulging beneath the loose and wrinkled skin.
    “You mean…a wheelchair. I’m not…an invalid.”
    “We could ask for a really crappy one if that would make you feel better. None of this high-speed electric power stuff. You’d wheel yourself. Think of the upper-body workout you’d get. I can even request a bum wheel so it would be like a bad shopping cart if you want.”
    Katie was happy to see her mother smiling, but then the smile turned into a laugh and her mother wheezed and then coughed. Her hand moved reflexively to her chest again.
    “Shhh,” Katie said soothingly.
    Her heart. The stroke. The falls. Keeping track of her mother’s ailments required Mensa-caliber mental juggling.
    The second her mother caught her breath, she was back on message. “No wheel…chairs.”
    “You scare me, Mom. I know you like to think it’s just a fall. But this isn’t something you can play around with. Falls in the elderly—”
    Her mother shot her a look of darts.
    “Falls now can be fatal. Do you know how stupid it would be to survive everything you’ve survived, just to