I'm lying down and watching a Jesse Stone DVD (“Benefit of the Doubt”) when I hear Norma calling from her bedroom.  Because of the movie, I can't hear what she's saying.  So I go to her bedroom door and ask her what's wrong.  “I want someone to talk to,” she says.  By this time, it's almost midnight, and she's been in bed more than an hour.  I go back to my room,, turn off the movie and return to sit in the wheel chair beside her bed. “What do you want to talk about?” I ask her.  “I don't know,” she says.

I feel so sorry for her—for the frustration that must dog her every waking minute—that I tell her I'll lie down with her.  It is not a solution I cherish.  Our kids keep suggesting I just resign myself to sleeping with her and be done with it.  But I don't like her bed.  It's hard. It has too many layers of covers, too many pillows.  I'm a cot and blanket guy.  That monastic arrangement served me well for the 30-some years Norma and I lived separately.  So I'm not going to go House Beautiful this late in the game.

Since she can't think of what to talk about, I cuddle up to her and start telling her stories.  About the gorgeous but fatally flawed black Jaguar sedan I bought her when I had only $5 in my pocket and was making only $85 a week as a cub reporter.   About the aluminum trailer we lived in after I got my first college teaching job and how we subsisted mostly on Campbell's bean and bacon soup.  About our joys in adopting Chris, Jason and Rachel.  “You remember so much,” she says.  “I wish I remembered all that.”  I ask her if she wants to listen to the Classic Country channel on TV, and she does.    After a while, she seems to be listening too quietly—no humming—and I realize she's finally gone to sleep.

I know she's dreaming when she begins muttering words.  She says them with a certain amount of drama, but I can't make any of them out.  Meanwhile the songs from the TV keep coming.  It's only when Johnny Rodriguez sings “You Always Come Back (to Hurting Me)” that she starts humming along.  Finally the music is permeating her dreams.  Her skeletal arms are in constant motion, rising and swaying out of her body like wisps of smoke.  Sometimes she raises her right hand to grasp her forehead.  In the half light of the bedroom, she looks young, her jawline firm and sharp, her cheekbones distinct.  She responds variously as the music streams on through Ronnie Misap's “I Wouldn't Have Missed It For the World,” Kenny and Dottie's “Every Time Two Fools Collide” and Crystal Gayle's “Baby, What About You.”  I know she's still sleeping. Her eyes are closed, and she doesn't reach over to touch me to reassure herself I'm still there as she usually does.  Then, Anne Murray begins singing “Could I Have This Dance” and Norma hums along loudly with every syllable.

I want to get up and go back to my room, even though three hours have elapsed since I first lay down with her.  But I'm afraid my departure will awaken and alarm her.  I can't sleep.  I just lie there on guard. Norma awakens around daylight.  I still haven't slept, but she insists on getting up.  I beg her to go back to sleep, explaining that I'm dead tired.  But my pleas don't move her.  I hiss and curse the situation—but not her personally—with an intensity that threatens to singe the curtains.  She does not blink.  I harrumph, emit steam from my nostrils and wedge her into her wheel chair.  I roll her down the hall, still cursing and predicting my imminent death at her hands.  I park her in the living room without turning on the lights, the TV or serving her breakfast.  My pique endures for about five minutes until I acknowledge that I'm the asshole in this tableau, that Norma always does the best she can with what she has.  And I don't.  “Poor me,” I realize, is rolling in clover compared to poor her.

I beg her forgiveness, serve her breakfast and try to catch a millisecond nap while she eats and watches the “Today” show's glib answers to all human problems.