I called my mom every morning after I got the kids off to school.  She was living alone in northern Michigan.  Her neighbors to the north used their place only in the summer.  Her neighbors to the south were very busy in the small town’s politics. I was worried about her!  She liked living alone, despite my fears.

We bought her a fax machine.  She put it on a small table in the darkest corner of her living room.  Her approach to this machine was hesitant at best.  I would wish her a good morning and send a fax.  I got nothing back.  She would then call me about the fax machine’s mysteries.  I then would write up another fax, a happy face, and wait.  This was taking up an hour.

I called her once again, “Did you get a happy face fax?”

She said “No” and something derogatory about the machine.

Then I asked if she had a paper jam.  “Paper jam…I don’t have any paper in the machine.”

I think she took the fax machine out of the house to go out with the garbage.  I was glad to go back to a simple phone call in the morning to check if she was alive and well.  But, I could not see her, as you can now through Skype.  On hot days my mother would close the curtains and walk around naked.  My aunt told me about this.  My mom also began to have cocktails by noon.  She set two chairs on fire while watching “Wheel of Fortune.”  Some days she forgot to eat a microwaved dinner after the cocktail hours.

I will never know by my phone call if she was naked, drinking, or starving.  I dragged myself, depleted, to take a nap. My aunt told me that she had sold a ten acre woodlot for a thousand dollars.  A Cadillac dealer took her to breakfast and she bought a new Cadillac as he picked up the check for twelve bucks plus a tip.

One morning I could not reach her and I called my aunt.  “She’s in Las Vegas.” said my aunt.  I had to wait a week before I called and she picked up.  She went with a woman about a decade older than me.  I did not know this woman at all.  Marie ran out of money midweek and my mom gave her five thousand dollars to play with.  Marie hit a jackpot, a big one, and my mom was miffed because she did not get paid back by Marie.  “Who the hell is Marie?”  I asked her.  “Oh, I don’t know.”

I lived in Connecticut, and the four kids were in school.  I grabbed the youngest one and threatened the older ones and flew to Michigan and drove a rental car up north to see what was really going on.  We went for pizza, and my mother drank three martinis. We watched her.  “It is time to go.”  I told her.  My youngest son and I had to carry her out of there.  I was in the midst of menopause and just hoped to run into Marie, the Cadillac dealer, or the guy who bought ten acres for a thousand bucks.  I didn’t, of course.  It is a small village and they all knew that I was there.