The Air Mattress in Our Basement

The guest room door was standing open when I got home, and the bed was gone.

Not unmade. Gone. The frame, the mattress, the quilt my mother had brought from her own house, the little lamp with the pull chain. In their place sat my husband’s desk, pushed back to the middle of the wall where it had been before Christmas, with both of his monitors on it and his chair tucked in neat.

Her pill organizer was not on the nightstand, because there was no nightstand.

I stood there in my coat with my purse still on my shoulder. It was a Tuesday in the middle of February, four below zero outside, and I had just driven twenty-two miles home from the dental office in Eau Claire on roads the plow had only half bothered with.

“Rick?”

He was in the kitchen, eating peanuts out of the jar over the sink.

“Where’s my mother?”

“Downstairs.” He did not turn around. “I got her all set up.”

“Downstairs where?”

“Angie. There’s one downstairs.”

We live in a three-bedroom ranch in Fall Creek. There is a main floor, and there is a basement, and the basement has never been finished. It has a poured concrete floor with a drain in the middle of it, a furnace, a water heater, a sump pump in the corner that kicks on with a thump, and thirteen open wooden steps with a railing on one side only.

I did not take my coat off. I opened the basement door and went down.

He had put her next to the furnace. I will give him that much, he had thought about the furnace.

She was lying on the camping air mattress, the green one we had not used since Josh was in Cub Scouts, the one that had lost air every night of that trip until we were all sleeping on the ground by morning. It had already gone soft under her hip. She had her winter coat on, zipped to the chin, and her knit hat pulled down over what was left of her hair, and her hands were tucked up inside her sleeves.

Next to her on the concrete was a kitchen mixing bowl. My good yellow one. He had given her a bowl in case she got sick, because the only bathroom in our house is at the top of those thirteen steps.

“Mom.”

“Oh, hi, honey.” She smiled at me like I had caught her napping on the davenport. “You’re home early.”

“I’m not early. It’s twenty after five.”

“Is it? I can’t tell down here.” She tried to push herself up and the mattress folded under her elbow. “Now don’t make a face. It’s fine. Rick needs his room, and it’s his house, and I’ve been in the way going on six weeks.”

There is a round thermometer that hangs on a nail by the furnace. Rick’s dad hung it there when he helped us move in. I looked at it.

Fifty-four degrees.

My mother was seventy years old. She was halfway through twelve weeks of chemo for colon cancer, the kind that makes cold feel like a burn. She could not take a carton of milk out of the refrigerator without an oven mitt. She could not drink water unless I had left it on the counter for an hour first. Cold air in her throat made it close up so she had to breathe through a scarf from the car to the door.

And she was lying a foot off a concrete floor in February, telling me it was fine.