The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd Page A

that.
    Mother turned away from his photograph and waited as I finished winding the gauze bandage around her hand. She was wearing her blue chenille robe, minus the belt. She gathered the collar up around her neck, then let her hand drift down to the drawer, the one with all the religious bilge. She fingered the handle. I wondered if the clipping about his death was still in there.
    Why had I given him the pipe?
    Dad and I had seen it one day in Caw Caw General, and he’d admired it. He’d picked it up and pretended to take a puff. “I’ve always wanted to be the kind of man who smoked a pipe,” he said. I’d taken every cent of my fiddler-crab money and bought it for him for Father’s Day. Mother had told me not to, that she didn’t want him smoking a pipe. I’d bought it anyway.
    She’d never said a word to me about its being the cause of the fire.
    I tore a piece of adhesive tape and fastened the end of the gauze to her wrist. She started to get up, but I knelt in front of her chair and placed my hands on her knees. I didn’t know where to start. But I’d taken this on. I’d banished Hugh, and now it was all mine.
    As I knelt there, my belief that I could handle it by myself was starting to break apart. Mother stared straight into my eyes. Her lower lids drooped down into deep curves, exposing their small pink linings. She looked timeless, older than her years.
    I said, “Last night in the garden, you mentioned Father Dominic, remember?”
    She shook her head. Her good hand lay in her lap, and I took it in mine, touching the tips of her fingers.
    â€œI asked you why you did this to your finger, and you brought up Dad, and then you mentioned Father Dominic. Did he have something to do with your cutting off your finger?”
    She gave me a blank look.
    â€œDid he give you the idea that you should do some kind of penance, something like that?”
    The blankness turned to exasperation. “No, of course not.”
    â€œBut cutting off your finger was penance, wasn’t it?”
    Her eyes darted away from my face.
    â€œPlease, Mother. We need to talk about it.”
    She pressed her teeth into her bottom lip and seemed to consider my question. I watched her touch a strand of her hair and thought how yellowish it looked.
    â€œI can’t talk about Dominic,” she said finally.
    â€œBut why not?”
    â€œI can’t, that’s all.”
    She picked up a prescription bottle and walked to the door. “I need to take my pain pill,” she said, and vanished into the hall, leaving me on my knees beside her dresser.

CHAPTER Eleven
    I spent the morning on a cleaning campaign, determined to be helpful. I changed the sheets on Mother’s bed, did the laundry, and scrubbed things that hadn’t been touched in years: the bathroom grout, the venetian blinds, the coils on the back of the refrigerator. I went into the pantry and threw away everything that had expired—two huge bags of stuff. I dragged her rusting golf cart out of the garage and cranked it up to see if it worked, and, eyeing the grimy bathtub grotto, I hooked up the garden hose and gave it a good spray-cleaning.
    Through all of this, I thought about Mother’s refusal to talk about my father’s death, her strange mention of Father Dominic.
    I thought on and off about Brother Thomas, too. I didn’t mean to—he simply wormed his way in. At one point I’d found myself poised under the exposed lightbulb in the pantry, holding a twenty-eight-ounce can of tomatoes, and realized I’d been replaying some moment with him from the night before.
    The day was warm, the sun bearing down with a throbbing winter brightness. Mother and I ate lunch on the front porch, balancing trays on our laps, eating the gumbo neither of us could face the night before. I tried to draw her out again about Dominic, but she sat there shuttered tightly.
    Looking for some way, any way,