Betty—actually Elizabeth, or, on her best stationery, Elizabeth Baker Hodgman—doesn’t see well at all. Certain corners of the world are blurred. Her hearing sometimes fails her, but it is often difficult to de­termine whether she is missing something or simply choosing not to respond. Also, she is suffering from dementia or maybe worse.

Some days she is just about fine, barking orders at Earleen, our clean­ing lady, sharp enough to play bridge with her longtime partners. Other times, though, she is a lost girl with sad eyes. I am scared I am going to break her. I am new at all this.

We have hunts for liquid tears, or checks, or hearing aids, or the blouse Earleen was supposed to have ironed for church. The mind of my mother has often drifted away from peripheral matters. She has always been busy on the inside, a little far away.

Now more than ever, she is in and out, more likely to drift off into her own world for a minute or two. Or sit staring for long spells with a vacant look. Or forget the name of someone she knew, back then, before she had to worry about not remembering. In the afternoons, her whimpers and moans, her little chats with herself are all I hear in the house. The nights, especially just before bed, are the worst. She knows something is hap­pening to her, but would never say so. We circle around her sadness, but she will not let me share it. Acknowledging anything would make it real. These, I fear, are her last days as herself.

My mother always drove fast, never stayed home. In the old days, we sped across the plains in our blue Impala, radio blaring DJ Johnny Rab­bitt’s all-American voice on KXOK St. Louis. She took me to the county line where I waited for the bus to kindergarten. My mother—"too damn high strung,” my father said—stayed in the bathroom fussing with her hair and smoking Kent cigarettes until the very last minute. “I look like something the cat drug in,” she told herself, frowning into the mirror.

When she finally came out, I’d be sitting on the hood of the car, my Batman lunch box already empty except for wads of foil and a few hast­ily scraped carrots.

“I’m a nervous wreck,” I’d cry out. I was an only child, raised mostly among adults. I repeated what I heard and didn’t get half of what I was saying.

“Why are you just sitting there?” she’d yell as if I were the one delay­ing things.

Those mornings, heading to school, I learned to love pop music, a lifelong fixation. My mother and I sang along to “This Diamond Ring” by Gary Lewis and the Playboys, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” by the Righteous Brothers, and Petula Clark’s “Downtown.” Betty took her shoe off the foot she used for the gas pedal and almost floored it.

I like fast things, and the highway between Madison and Moberly will always be one of the places where I will see my mother, hair wrapped in rollers under a scarf, wearing a pair of sunglasses, taking me off into the big wide world.

“What are you looking at, little demon?” she would ask.

“Don’t bug me,” I’d say. “Mind your own business.”

“You are my business.”

“Betty,” my father often said, “no one would mistake that kid for anyone’s but yours.”

I was Betty’s boy.

This year, Betty had to give up her driver’s license after backing into a ditch. Now she must sit home, awaiting invitations. “They won’t even let me go to the grocery store,” she says. Her eyes are wistful and her fingers, with their chipped pink polish, are itchy for the feel of the car keys.

Suddenly, Betty yells out. “Oh God,” I think as I run to her, trip on a hair curler and barely escape ankle injury. “What is it?” I ask as I ap­proach her door. “What is it?”

“Say,” she begins, “you didn’t get toilet paper.”

We go through enough toilet paper for an army. I think she is in­volved in some sort of art project. A kind of Christo thing.

“I’ll get some tomorrow,” I say.

“That suits me,” she answers, pausing before asking, “Did you make me a hair appointment?”

“I told them it was an emergency.”

It is 3 a.m. I steal a cigarette from my mother’s old, hidden cache and sit out on the step in front of our house in the dark. The mailbox made by my father is falling apart now. I would fix it, but am not handy. Nor do I assemble. A trip to Ikea is enough to unhinge me. I would prefer a spinal tap to putting together a coffee table.

I am running out of meals I know how to prepare. Tonight, feeling nostalgic, I rolled out tuna casserole made with Campbell’s Mushroom Soup and crushed potato chips.

“I didn’t know anyone still made this,” she said.

“I was trying to think outside the box . . . Mushrooms are vegeta­bles. Or are they a fungus?”

“Be still.”

Mushrooms, I realized, are a fungus. I had served my mother a fun­gus casserole. With barbecue potato chips.

“There is no such thing as a perfect parent.” Betty always said that. But to me she was perfect. Especially when she thought she was not. In grade school, on holidays, the mothers brought refreshments. Popcorn balls—crunchy white confections with the popped kernels held together with sorghum—were my favorites. When it was her turn to bring treats, Betty asked what I wanted. I said, “Popcorn balls.” She said, “Oh brother,” and lit a cigarette.

The kitchen was not her natural habitat. Her tendency to never turn things off led to exploding percolators and smoky puffs from toasters. A few days after my popcorn-ball request, I found Betty in front of the oven in her hair rollers, which were held in place with pink picks that tended to turn up all around the house. The kitchen, never a page from Good Housekeeping, was strewn with bowls and baking sheets. Sticky lumps of popcorn and fallen curlers were everywhere. On a tray there was a strange grouping of misshapen popcorn balls.

When I said they were supposed to be all the same size, Betty ap­peared exasperated, harassed, so forlorn and disappointed. She had failed. Nothing was right. She thought she had to be some kind of model mother.

I reached for a ball and took a bite. “I think these are the best I’ve had,” I told her as I stuck some of the picks from her curlers into the balls so they would look a little snazzy.

“Why are you doing that?” she said. “Go outside and throw some­thing.”

My mother should not live alone now, but vetoes all conventional alter­natives. I try to pretend I am in control. It is my time to play the grown-up and I don’t want the part. “Don’t put me in a place with a lot of old people,” she says.

“Fine,” I say to myself. “I’ll go.”

In my apartment in New York there are tumbling piles of books and, in the refrigerator, cartons of take-out food I forgot to throw out. By now it must have sprouted new life forms. I imagine squatters with grimy faces, warming their hands over fires crackling from large rusty barrels. Chickens are running everywhere, clucking and bursting madly into flight. I am probably going to have to stay here in Missouri and become a horse whisperer.

I have three pairs of pants and about five summer shirts, food-stained from my culinary efforts. This visit, for my mother’s birthday, was sup­posed to last two weeks. It is getting on two months. I lost my job; I have the time. I am not a martyr. I am just available, an unemployed editor relegated to working freelance.

I think about leaving, but cannot seem to make it to the plane. My fingers will not dial the American Airlines number and I realize that my place in New York would feel very empty if I returned. I miss the company of people from work. I’d miss Betty too. Turns out I am a person who needs people. I hate that.

“Don’t leave me,” Betty says, if I go to bed before she is ready also. “Are you going to leave me?” If I start to move my work to my father’s desk in the back of the house, forsaking the card table near the couch that is her center of command, she begs me to stay. She sits beside me all day, always wants me near, a real change from the woman who was always shooing me away, off to camp or college, or the next phase, off to be in­dependent. If I allow someone else to take her to the doctor—the foot doctor, say, not an emergency situation—he is angry for a day or two. This is how it is now.

My mother is scared. I cannot believe it. But she will not speak of her fears. She is locked up tight. She keeps her secrets. I keep mine. That is our way. We have always struggled with words.

I am never certain quite what I will wake up to. Recently, as she was preparing for our daily walk, I discovered her trying to put her sock on over her shoe. This interlude, I know, cannot last. My life, such as it is, is on hold. I am worried by how we are living now, scared of drifting, losing footing on my own ground. Soon she will need more than I can provide, but she is not ready to give up. Despite her vision, her fading hearing, her stomach problems, and the rest, she tries to hold on in this place that is so familiar, her home.

It is the smallest things that trouble my mother most—the glass bro­ken, the roast she cannot bake right, the can opener she cannot com­mand to do its work, the TV remote control she cannot operate. Tell her the house is on fire and she will go on with the newspaper. Tell her you cannot find her address book and she will almost fold. Yet she has always been a determined woman, a force. She has been my rock and I am con­vinced that, at some level, she has survived to give me—a gay man whose life she has never understood—a place to call home.

In her wake now, a path of open cabinets, dirty Kleenexes and crumbs, cantaloupe seeds on the couch and the floor, bills she intends to pay, food left out to spoil. I polish the silver, fix her meals, buy her new bracelets, leave Peppermint Patties under her pillow, drive her to her battalion of doctors. I buy mountains of fresh fruit, still—like ice cream—a luxury for a woman raised in the country during the Depres­sion. Even after decades of relative prosperity, a bowl of fresh strawber­ries remains a thing of beauty to her, a wonderful surprise. She spies them with the delight of an excited girl.

I try to imagine anything that will make her a little happier. If only, just once in a while, she could look a little happier. I know that her days are numbered in this house, built by my father, where deer run in the backyard and Sara Dawson down the street watches for Betty’s light in the mornings, in the kitchen window where so many times I have seen my mother’s face watching out for me as I turned into the driveway. For both of us, finally, I know, these are our final days of home. I am a loner, but I hate to lose people. I can only imagine how scary it is to know that the person one is losing is oneself.

From BETTYVILLE by George Hodgman. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company.
Copyright © George Hodgman, 2015.