The Casino Sign My Mother Read

What I did not say

I did not scream at him. I want that known.

I have thought a lot about why. Some of it is that I am not a screamer, never have been, my mother raised me to believe a raised voice is a surrendered argument. Some of it is that I was holding a thing and I did not want to drop it.

The thing I was holding was my mother.

Because while Greg was feeding my turbine money into a machine in Tunica, I had spent that same week sitting in my mother’s kitchen watching her run her thumb over a prescription bottle, trying to read the label by feel.

“It’s the blue one or the white one,” she said. “I think it’s the blue one.”

“Mama, let me see.”

“I’ve got it.” She did not have it. She held it up to the window and tilted it and squinted, and her eyes, which used to be the sharpest thing about her, slid around the label like it was underwater.

My mother’s name is Nita. She is sixty-eight years old. For most of her life she was the woman in our church who read the scripture out loud on Sunday because she never stumbled, who did the crossword in ink, who read me the entire Little House on the Prairie series at the kitchen table in a voice that did all the different people.

For about two years she had not been able to read.

The clouding

It came on slow, the way it does. First she stopped doing the crossword and said it was because the paper made them too hard now. Then she quit her book club and said the books had gotten boring. Then one Sunday she handed the scripture reading off to another woman and said her throat was bothering her, and I saw her face when she said it, and I knew it was not her throat.

I noticed it for real the day she burned the cornbread. My mother has never burned a pan of cornbread in her life. She sets the oven by the little dial and she knows that oven like her own hand. But that day she pulled it out black on the bottom, and when I asked her she said she could not read the numbers on the dial anymore and had been guessing. She said it like it was a small thing. It was not a small thing. A woman who guesses at her own oven is a woman who has lost something.

Then I started seeing the rest of it. The missed step off the porch. The way she quit driving to Wednesday night service and said she was just tired. The time she poured salt in her coffee because the two tins on the counter looked the same to her now.

It was cataracts. Both eyes. The eye doctor in town, Dr. Reed, had told her a year before that they were ready to come off whenever she wanted.

“Medicare pays for the regular kind,” she told me in the car after that appointment, matter of fact, like she was reading me a weather report. “But he says at my age, with my eyes, the regular lens, I’d still need the thick reading glasses and I’d still have the glare at night and I couldn’t drive after dark. The good lenses, the ones that fix the up close and the far off both, Medicare doesn’t pay a dime on those. Four thousand an eye.”