Free More Than Enough by John Fulton

Assisted Living, where she fed and bathed old people forty hours a week, and had already shouted down the hall that she could not, absolutely not, be late for work again if we wanted to have food on our table. She’d taken the job a month ago, right after my injury, so that our family could have full-coverage medical insurance. She was a nurse’s aide, and did whatever duties the doctors and nurses weren’t willing to do. It was the sort of job that was difficult to fill and that no one wanted, which was why the benefits were good and the pay wasn’t bad. She’d probably gotten it because she’d finished a year of nursing school when she was nineteen or twenty and because nobody more qualified had applied for it. “Please! Please!” Jenny shouted through the cracked bathroom door until my mother rushed out of her room with her nurse’s white blouse half undone so that, eating my toast in the kitchen, I had to look away from the site of her bra, the textured lace of it, and had to put that image out of my mind.
    â€œWill you please cooperate for once?” She shouted out the word cooperate in this long, desperate way.
    Just as my mother turned around and headed back to her room, Jenny shoved her face out the bathroom door. “What am I supposed to do with this? I can’t go like this. Nobody even cares.” She let her hair drop. She shook it the way a wet dog does, water flying out into the air. She had tryouts for the Billmore drill team that afternoon and wanted to look her best.
    â€œIt’s just your stupid hair,” I said.
    â€œWhat can I do? I’ll do something,” my father said because he hated it when Jenny threw a tantrum. Her moods really worked on him. They really upset him. He stood from the breakfast table with melted butter from his toast shining on his fingertips and walked over to the bathroom where Jenny slammed the door on him. “I’ll help, sweetie.”
    â€œYou can’t help. Only Mom can help.”
    â€œShe says only you can help!” my father shouted down the hall to my mother.
    â€œShe’s doing this on purpose,” I said.
    When my mother didn’t respond, Jenny said, “Get her for me, please.” Her voice came through the door in a long, pink, soft hush that my mother had somehow heard down the hall.
    â€œAll right,” she said, bolting out of her room, her white blouse still half open so that once again I had to look away, though not before I saw the strained cords in her neck, the soft strokes of her clavicles, the lacy cups of her bra and the little white silk bow poised delicately above her sternum. Seeing that bothered me. I don’t think I ever desired my mother in a way that I had to feel ashamed of. I understood that she was a woman as well as my mother. But I also knew that in other families mothers did not walk through the hallway in half-rages with their blouses open. I knew that in other families sons did not have to look away, did not have to erase the picture in their heads of the little white bow.
    â€œI’m here,” she said to the closed bathroom door, and Jenny opened it and looked at her with vulnerable eyes that anticipated a harsh reaction and stopped it before it could happen. “Just give me a comb and barrettes,” my mother said with a great deal of resignation, and for the next fifteen minutes my mother worked Jenny’s hair into a subtle, tight crown of cuteness, combing, curling, blow-drying, tucking strands in, pinning and tying off two ribbons and clipping down a translucent purple barrette that matched her Swatch watch perfectly. “There,” my mother said, though of course she would be late again that day and our insurance, our ability to pay bills, to put food on the table, to put gas in the car and clothes on our backs would once again be threatened.
    â€œThank you,” Jenny said.
    â€œYou’re welcome,” my mother said,