She sits hunched in her wheelchair in 72 degrees, too cold for 90 years old with only a skin of skin on the bones that have carried her from place to place: West Virginia to Roanoke, house to house, the last for 40 years until the bone of her head hit the bone white of the tub. Then they took her to a place where she lay in bed, breathing from a snake of oxygen that wound beneath the sounds and smells of the old building where others have laid and left, walking or riding or floating into the spirit air.
Weeks later, they took her to another place. This one had colors and softness and more people to care for her and better food to eat, if you have the will to eat it. It’s a place where they work to strengthen her body and bring back her mind. But all she wants now is to rest — rest after hard years of four girls and a good husband, but no money; of his parents and then her own mother climbing on top of her to carry them step by slow step up the long climb of life. They got off one by one, but only after the strength of her bones was nearly worn away.
So she huddles forward, cold in the inside air, and slowly takes a spoon of red jello and lifts it up until it finally reaches her bottom lip and falls forward into the mouth she holds open. She closes her lips, the ones that have kissed the four girls, kissed the tall man with the mustache even to his last kiss when he lay yellow and weak, near the faraway place he had worked so hard to reach against the pull of the world and the stronger pull of whiskey. At his last breath he was near the edge of that place and her kiss let him go into its light.
She closes her lips and moves her jaws, slowly up and down and around, while the red, wobbly jello grows warm and liquid and slides down her throat, and her face grimaces as she swallows. She touches a napkin to her lips and puts it back into her lap. Then she takes another mouthful and later another one and then she sits back, tired in those 90-year old bones, tired from all of the years of carrying and caring with no relief.
There are lines in her forehead from the tiredness and the weakness and the having to eat red jello, just one more thing she has to do after 90 years of things she’s had to do. Then her eyelids close. They are old and tired, like the eyes behind them, like everything else, tired, so tired.
A month later, she closes her eyes again and doesn’t open them. She’s in different place now, gone to look for the tall man with the mustache so they can wait together for their girls.
No more red jello, no more tiredness. Just brightness and love.