The bell rang, jerking James, again, from a deep sleep. 'This is getting to be ridiculous.' The clock's neon display showed three twenty-four AM.

Feeling envious of the little snores coming from his wife, Beth, behind him, James sat on the edge of the bed and shook his head trying to clear the fog from his mind. 'Everybody’s got their problems to deal with, ' he sighed, 'and I've got to deal with mine.'

The bell rang again. "I’m coming damn it, I’m coming." His feet finally found slippers in the dark; he got up and went to the room at the end of the hall.

Lily, his elderly mother, lay on the bed holding the little bell in her hands, ready to ring again. Although it had been two years since she had become ill and moved in with his family, he couldn’t get used to her new look. Her wrists and inner elbows were bruised and crisscrossed with wires, hoses, a connector for a dialysis machine; a pacemaker bulged on her chest beneath her pale, yellowish skin; both of her skinny legs were plastered with dressings, covering sores that refused to heal because of diabetes.

Yet her eyes, though sunken in dark pits and carrying an expression of resigned suffering still, somehow, managed to be very expressive.

"Jimmy, can you scratch my back?" Her voice, transversing somewhere between plaintive soprano and dignified contralto, filled the room’s stillness.

James' own voice was determinedly calm - belying, he hoped, of the anger and frustration he was, at that moment, actually, feeling. "Mama, do you know what time it is? Don't you understand I have to get up for work at six? That’s less than three hours from now. I can't live like this. Mama, I’m just going to collapse one day. It's ok when you need to be changed, but this scratching's going to kill me."

"But it's itching. So bad. Please. I tried to do it myself, but I can't reach it. It's right between my shoulder blades." Lily lifted herself slightly on one frail arm and demonstrated how her hand couldn't reach her back. James wanted to turn right around and go back to bed, but he stopped himself and only sighed and shook his head.

Sitting on Lily's bed, he ran his hand up underneath her nightgown and scratched the requested spot. The skin felt dry and wrinkly.

"Ahhhhh... goooood," Lily closed her eyes and opened her mouth. "A little more to the right now. Ahhhhh… goood." She opened her eyes. "And they say the soul is not connected to the body. What hogwash."

"Let me put some cream on it." He spread a generous splash of cream all over her back and rubbed it in. "Ok, then," he pulled her nightgown back down and got up, already trying to catch the tail of a dream that still roamed somewhere in his mind.

"Wait, don't leave. I see so little of you. I want to tell you something."

"I need to go to sleep, Mama. I have to get up in a few hours for work. I just told you that."

"Yes, yes. I know." She sighed. "You're right, you go."

James continued out of the room then stopped in the middle of the corridor, came back, and sat on Lily's bed again.

"Ok. What did you want to tell me?"

Lily's tense pout smoothed to a pleased grin and she settled back into her pillow. "You know how I like lectures about art. So one evening when I was at this lecture at the library...” James sighed. He had heard this story many times. "...this lady got up and started telling about her son, who was an artist. She said how his art was misunderstood and how we live in this commercial world that doesn't appreciate pure art, and talked about the great old days when things were different. So I got up and told her that Raphael, Da Vinci, Rembrandt - all those great artists - they all worked for money. Michelangelo even stopped painting the Sistene Chapel for a time because the Pope reneged on paying him what they’d agreed on, what he’d promised.”

“Well, that shut her up, but good, she didn’t have one, single, thing to say after that, just turned around and sat back down. I guess she’d never heard that about Michelangelo.

“But, oh, if only you could have seen her face, the look on it, all the colors it turned, probably just like in one of her son’s paintings. Oh, Jimmy, it was just so funny!”

The sparkle in his mother’s eyes, the almost girlish tinkling of her delighted laughter at this recollected victory suddenly reminded him of the times, so long ago, when she’d be the one perched on the edge of his bed, tucking him in and lulling him to sleep with his favorite story, the story of the three bears. Suddenly he felt warm and nostalgic, some for his childhood but, mostly, for his mother, and the way she had been back then. And, so, James laughed, along with her. Which delighted her even more.

"Ok, Jimmy, thank you. Let me kiss you and you go to sleep. I will too. i really am tired."

James got up and went to his bed. 'Thank God, vacation time is coming soon,' he thought right before blissful sleep embraced him, once again, in its fat, fuzzy paws.

"Mama, it's for only one week, while we're away.” James was packing Lily’s cream in her little suitcase and searching for her mirror. He’d made arrangements to place Lily, temporarily, in a nursing facility, the same one he’d put her in the year before when he and Beth and the kids went to Barbados. “You’ve been there before, you know the place, what’s the big deal?”

Lily stared up at him, eyes dark and wide. "I’m afraid I'm not going to see you again."

"Don’t be silly, Mama, it’s just like last year, you’ll be there for the week and, then, back home before you even know it. You’ll see me again, don’t worry. Nothing’s going to happen."

"But you don’t know that. You don’t know nothing’s going to happen. Anything could happen.”

“No, Mama, nothing’s going to happen. I promise.”

The look of fearful skepticism on his mother’s face relaxed slightly. “You promise?”

“Yes, Mama, I promise.”

Lily’s face eased slowly into a smile and she cast her attention, now, over the bed, patting and smoothing its sheets around her.

“Okay, Jimmy, that’s fine, then. You go, have fun.”

Cancun was exactly what James needed: ocean, sand, food and drinks everywhere, activities for the body and oblivion for the mind. Lying on the beach he did his best to not even think, just let his thoughts dance lightly across the surface of his mind, just as the clear, green waves washed gently, in and out, across the hot white sand, lulling him to sleep.

"James, we’ve been back three days, now - don't you want to at least call her?" Phone in hand, Beth stood looking at him over the credit card statements, insurance payment forms, and letters piled high on his desk.

James rolled his eyes. "Of course, I do. It's just...” he thought of the dodets at work that had gotten out of whack in his absence, and the luggage that had gotten lost on the way back from Cancun, and the roof leak above his family room. "It's just... you know how she is, if she knew we were back, she’d want to come home right away. And I’d rather leave her there for a couple of days more. Just till I can get a handle on things here. Believe me, Beth, she’s fine where she is. A couple more days is all I need, just another couple of days.”

To his chagrin, the next day, though, Beth - impatient to have everything settled back where it should be - made arrangements with the nursing facility to bring Lily home on Monday. On the one hand, James was glad he would see his mother but, on the other, he braced himself for the long, hard nights he knew were coming.

On Saturday, through the dim wall of noise coming from the television and his sleepy half-consciousness, James heard the phone ring. Beth, with her many sisters and cousins was, as always, right on it and, almost immediately, the rhythmic thuds of a basketball hitting wood was joined by the sound of his wife’s high-pitched staccato. It was the sudden cramp, a sharp rise, and fall, in her voice that made him open his eyes and sit up on the couch. A long, tense, minute later Beth walked into his office, lips trembling, tears in her eyes.

"What's wrong, Beth?”

“Your mother.“

James recognized the people who came to the funeral and was thankful to them for coming but, at the same time he found himself slightly resentful of them, occasionally overwhelmed with the feeling that they were really there only to watch him, to monitor how well he would stand up to his responsibilities as a grieving son, to judge whether, at least, his eulogy would do right by her.

James knew he wouldn't be able to speak well. His throat spasmed, but he had no difficulty holding back tears - for some reason, he found himself unable to cry. This concerned him but, in a way, he was glad of it. It allowed him to focus on just how to explain to all these people who his mother really was - so different from any other person, someone who didn't fit in the template of the typical mother. He felt helpless, trapped in the task of translating her into their language.

When it was time, heart pounding as if in a dream, James felt himself step up to the podium. Looking down, he saw his shaking hands unfolding the sheets of paper that held his speech. Listening, he heard his voice, deep, thick, cracking occasionally, monotoning parades of words. “Proud and strong.” “Talented and unique.” “Forever in my heart.”

And, then, still dry-eyed, he was done.

The next, few, hours flowed in a muffled blur of necessary arrangements and required behaviours into a dull, aching march of activity till, one day, the sun rose and James realized weeks had passed and, though the absence of his mother still felt strange, unexplainable, and temporary, he was, slowly, putting it all into perspective and moving on. Lives were lived the way they were, lives ended the way they did, and lives went on, the way they must. So he got up every morning, went to work, took his exercise, ate with appetite, enjoyed movies with Beth and the kids, and his days slowly began to fall back into their natural, unassuming, rhythms.

Till, eventually, it was only in the dense stillness of his nights, while everyone else was asleep, that he heard it, like a heart, like a heart within his heart, insistently thudding, over and over.

“But you promised, Jimmy.

“You promised.

“You promised.

“You promised.”

And it was only then, in the dense stillness of those nights, while everyone else was embraced, contented, comforted in the fat, fuzzy paws of carefree dreaming, that James’ tears would, finally, flow.