The Skin under My
Wedding Ring
by Tim Skeen

My Heart Is with You
in This Sad Time
by Angelina Mirabella

Jostling with the Actual:
My Summer with Saul
Bellow
by Michael Griffith

My Heart Is with You in This Sad Time
    Angelina Mirabella

My sister, Helen, is a fierce believer in the preternatural connection between twins. Twinnergy, she calls it. She’s been convinced of this phenomenon for over thirty years, since our first day of school, when we were separated for the first time and sent to different classrooms. She swears she could feel my intense sorrow over her absence, and could even picture me sitting at my desk chewing the ends of my hair in my anguish, but I don’t remember anything except my crisp new Tip and Mittens reader. There have been times when she called me from her home in Atlanta to say things like, “My foot is tingling! Did you stub your toe?” I’ve always known it would be easier to just say, “You know, I did stub my toe! Isn’t that something?” But I’ve never done that. I’ve always said, “Sorry. No.”
    This afternoon, Helen pulls her minivan into the oyster shell driveway of the home where we grew up: a forgettable kind of place on the Forgotten Coast of Florida. The reason for her six-hour trek from Georgia is twofold: to put this house on the market, and to take our mother back to Atlanta and put her into a nursing home close to her house. Late last spring, we agreed that I’d sublet my apartment in North Carolina, say good-bye to Marty, and take a leave of absence from teaching for one year so Mama could spend her remaining lucidity in a familiar setting. After that the responsibility was Helen’s. The year isn’t up but the lucidity is, and the dementia and wandering are getting to be too much for me to handle. I have both longed for and dreaded this visit. I thought perhaps the moment Helen parked, I would become resolved to one feeling, relief or reluctance, and be able to move forward from there, but no. Both feelings are still present, coexisting more than wrestling with each other, which is somehow worse.
    The first thing Helen says when she gets out of the minivan is, “What are you doing to make the azaleas so beautiful?” It’s true, the azaleas are particularly lovely this season. I have spent much of my free time—what there is of it—tending to the azaleas that our mother planted along the perimeter of the house the year our father left. In the late fall, I dug up all the volunteer palmettos and trumpet vines that choked the bushes, and a month ago I started fertilizing. Seeing them full of sherbet-colored blooms has been one of my few pleasures recently. But I don’t want Helen to ask about the azaleas. I want her to ask about our mother—to ask about me.
    “How was your trip?” I reply.
    Before she can answer me, I see the heads of my nephews peeking out of the tinted van windows, and add, “You brought the boys.” I smile at them, but I am not happy that they are here. I specifically asked Helen not to bring them. I’m not sure they’ll be able to handle their grandmother, or that she’ll be able to handle them.

Continued in volume 41, issue 4, autumn 2005