She was seventy four and midway through chemotherapy when I brought her home with us, into the ground floor guest room opposite the bathroom, because stairs had become impossible for her. I asked Roland first. He was not enthusiastic but he agreed. Then work sent me away for six days, and when the last meeting ended early I drove back on the morning of the sixth instead of the evening.
Crisps trodden into the carpet. Beer bottles across every surface. The television going in my mother’s room, where my husband and his brother had set themselves up because that was where the screen was. He went white when he saw me. Then he told me he had put my mother in the basement, and when I said it was her room, he shouted that it was his room and his house and that he was the man of the house and did not care about anything else. She was asleep on an air mattress on concrete.
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