Falling from Grace

I was working on a CD for Grace, since she's making one for me, when Mom called tonight. This was after Brooke had made quiche like quiche has never been experienced--a creamy, cheesy, vegetably mixture, not the chunky eggy stuff you get in the freezer section of the Super Giant Grocery Store--and we were nursing the bottle of pinot noir that Grace sent in honor of Sodomy Day.

I had been on and offline, being an amateur and having only my free work account, no fancy cable DSL doodad, and I was finally rebooting after downloading the largest driver known to lesbiankind when Mom called. She asked how I was doing. I had had half a beer and a glass of wine at this point, so I sounded aloof, (You know, fine. Fine, sure. Yeah, I know that you mean since you called on Monday to tell me that you have a bleeding lump of cancer in your brain.) although that was not my intention.

We cried some more. She's going to the cabin with Dad, even though she can't really afford the time away from work. It's what she wants.

On the phone, she said, "Sunday," when I know she meant, "Tuesday," and it scared me more than it should have. Mom's always been the type to forget names of people, places, and things, to call her children by the pets' names and pets by the children's. Both Hope and Brooke respond when Mom calls out either of their names, and she still calls me Moshie. Moshie, my childhood cat, has been dead for a number of years. The simple mixup of Sunday and Tuesday shouldn't have seemed dire, but it did. After all, Sunday is nothing *like* Tuesday. Tuesday is drudgery day. Sunday is coffee and the New York Times and long naps while listening to the radio.