The Wheelchair My Brother Would Not Allow

“He doesn’t want me there,” she said. It was not a question.

“Mom.”

“It’s the chair.” She said it plain, no self-pity, my mother has never in her life had one ounce of self-pity, which somehow made it so much worse. “It’s all right, Nora. I’ve known a while. He hasn’t wanted me anywhere since I stopped being able to walk in on my own two feet.”

“He said it’s the staircase.”

“I’m sure he did.” She turned the magazine page she was not reading. “You go. Don’t you dare miss Hailey’s wedding on my account. That girl shouldn’t lose both of us just because her daddy’s ashamed of a wheelchair. You go, and you take pictures, and you tell her, her grandmother loves her.”

I looked at the closet door standing open across her little room, and hanging on the front of it, pressed, was a dress. A soft blue dress with tiny buttons, and beside it on the dresser a corsage in a clear plastic box, white roses, that she must have ordered herself, weeks ago, when she still thought she was going. She saw me see it. She did not say anything about it, and neither did I, and that unworn corsage in its plastic box has stayed in my mind ever since as the single saddest thing I have ever looked at, my seventy-nine year old mother who had bought herself flowers for a wedding she had just been told she could not attend.

I stayed with Mom late that night, longer than I needed to. We did not talk much about the wedding. We watched one of her programs and I made us tea and I kept looking at that blue dress on the closet door, and at one point she caught me looking and she said, “Take it down and put it away, Nora, I can’t look at it.” So I took it down and I laid it flat in the bottom drawer of her dresser, folding it careful, the way you fold something you cannot bear to hang up anymore, and I put the corsage in its plastic box in the refrigerator the way you do with flowers, out of some habit of hope I could not shake even then, and I did not know yet that habit of hope was going to matter.