The Insulin I Carried to My Mother’s Door

Thursday morning

Tucker’s sugar came down overnight. By six in the morning he was 220, and at seven he ate half a can of his prescription food out of Dr. Ostrander’s hand and then looked around for more.

“He’s mad at us,” the tech said, laughing. “That’s a good sign. The angry ones go home.”

They kept him until Thursday afternoon. My mother drove me back to pick him up, and she carried the carrier out to the car herself, holding it level with both hands like it was full of eggs. She drove us to my apartment. Not to hers.

She carried his bed in from her trunk, and his bowls, and set the litter box back where it goes, behind the bathroom door.

Then she stood in the middle of my small living room with her purse on her arm, and took her key ring out of her pocket, and worked one key off it. My key. The one she had carried for twenty-two years. She held it out.

“I shouldn’t have this,” she said. “Not the way I used it.”

I looked at the key in her hand for a long time. Then I closed her fingers back over it.

“Keep it,” I said. “But I want you to learn something first.”

The lesson

I showed her that evening, at 6:45, at my kitchen counter.

How to open the can and wait for him to eat it all. How to check the notebook. How to roll the little pen between your palms, to mix it. How to dial one unit. How to lift the loose skin between his shoulders into a little tent with your left hand.

“I can’t,” she said. “My hands shake.”

“Mine shook too, the first time.”

“You’re a nurse.”

“And he’s a cat, Mom. He doesn’t care.”

Tucker sat on the counter, done with his supper, washing his face with one paw. My mother held the pen the way you’d hold a pencil for the first time.

“Right there,” I said. “Quick. Like you’re tapping him.”

She did it. Tucker didn’t even stop washing. My mother stood there holding the empty pen with her mouth open.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

She sat down hard on my kitchen stool and laughed and cried at the same time, and Tucker walked across the counter and climbed into her lap and turned around twice and lay down, with his crooked tail curled around her wrist.

“I’m sorry,” she said into his fur. I don’t think it was to him.