1. While Dad Is at a Committee Meeting

We eat dinner without him in the kitchen. Bright orange macaroni and cheese, sweet stewed tomatoes from a can. My stuffed bear sits beside me, in my old high chair, wearing a retired baby sweater.

Across the formica table, my brother's eyes widen, cheeks puff out, until he can't hold his mouth shut any more. An explosion onto the dishes and placemats, yellow and red vomit, volcanic, acrid, sprays onto my shirt, pools under my chair. The smell overwhelms. I can't help it, I erupt too. Onto the beige vinyl floor, its barfy pattern I have crawled on and memorized.

"GO TO THE BATHROOM," Mom says, trying to hold in her own dinner.

Later, I find her, leaning on a mop, wiping a real fever from her brow, a lock of her brown hair spilling. She can barely keep her eyes open, keep her body erect.

I think of "The Sound of Music." She doesn't let us play the record without warning her. It was big while she was pregnant with me, she says. If it catches her off guard, the memory of nausea takes over, and she has to lie down on the floor. Sometimes you don't have to be sick to feel sick. I get it now. I'm not sick, not like them, the real flu. Mine is a mere case of sympathy barf. I want to help. But she shoos me out of the room. "GO TO BED."

I back down the hall, and obey. I lie under the covers, eyes open, listen to water running in the enamel sink, the mop head hitting the kitchen walls.

2. Word Travels Fast in This Hospital

A chaplain in a brown corduroy skirt enters Mom's room. "I'm here to talk. Would you like to pray?"

"No, it’s not something I do," I say. I lost God in college, before I moved out, before cancer moved in.

"Okay." We sit and look at the pale, thin body, curled fetal under the light blanket, her feet in padded blue boots. She looks the same, only now the room is quiet. No oxygen mask. No machines hissing. Harp music from the tape player next to her ear. We've been sitting here for days. Dad changing the tape in the deck: Brahms, Fauré. Requiems. My brother writing the date on the chalkboard: November 2. Day of the Dead. Light from the window over Mom's head. Birds talking outside.

"Dad is going to be upset. He just went home to take a shower. My brother left this morning. We were all waiting together."

"Sometimes I think they don’t want to be watched."

They, them. In rooms all around us, other families, other vigils. A uniformed janitor enters the room with a mop and bucket, then goes to work on the white linoleum floor, around the quiet bed, into the bathroom, under our feet. The chaplain holds her hands in her lap. The janitor does not look up. This is just another day in the ward. This is just another dirty floor, another necessary paycheck.

We need to remove Mom's earrings and wristwatch, but I'm not ready to touch her. So I wait. The chaplain leaves. I look at Mom's open mouth, her chapped lips, her thin fuzz of hair. I want to take her hand, but I fear it will be something else.

When he returns, Dad's hands go right to her forehead. "Jane." Petting it, like a sleepy child, like he did night after night on the couch in the living room, putting lotion on her dry, balding scalp, waiting for the pain pills to take over.

3. In the Back of Every Collar

Mom sewed a white tag with my name, ANNE ELIZABETH ELLIOTT, in red, important letters. She bought them in a big ribbon roll. Cut off one name at a time, stitched them into waistbands, mitten cuffs, hat linings. I find one in the back of my closet, on that blue madras tote bag, the one with red rickrack on the pencil pocket. I remember watching her make the bag. She wrapped the plaid remnant around the Seattle telephone book, pinned it into place.

I don't know when I rejected the bag, only why: it looked homemade. Plaid was for nerds. I could not be seen in rickrack. Mom didn't fight me. The bag would find another use.

Now, the bag is mine again. Been sitting in the closet for ten years, four bedrooms. I blow off dust and look through its contents, needing a project: knitting pamphlets, needles, bobbins, balls of leftover Christmas-sock yarn. I page through the patterns, the rows of code, the sample photos. Knit by professionals, draped on thin hippie bodies and spotless sofas, cast against Irish seascapes. One by one, the faces fade, and I recognize the objects: the Faire Isle sweater she knit in a circle, the red cable cardigan she never finished. The yellow chevron afghan, bright as powdered cheese, now pilly with age, folded on the back of my brother’s couch.