Free Garden of Eden by Sharon Butala

Rosalie is religious though, nursed for her church for a few years in Bangladesh or Thailand or somewhere.
    “You know, Iris,” Rosalie says, still not looking up, “your mother could be at home. There’s nothing much the matter with her.” Iris can’t think what to say. What about her mother’s heart? What about her forgetfulness? She’s about to respond with a polite “Oh?” but Rosalie goes on. “She’s stable enough. And that disorientation she has sometimes — who wouldn’t get disoriented with nobody to talk to day after day after day?” She looks up now, something glimmering inher dark eyes that are so striking in that plain, aging face that Iris is taken aback.
    “That’s one reason we brought her here after Dad died,” she replies stiffly. “So she’d have people her own age to socialize with. We couldn’t leave her on her own in town and she’d have been lonely with us out on the farm.” Rosalie doesn’t say anything, just looks down to her papers. After a second’s silence, feeling as if she’s somehow been humiliated, Iris walks away.
    Her mother is sitting across the room in a leather armchair, her legs covered with an afghan composed of white daisies with yellow centres that Iris remembers her, in better days, crocheting herself. She lifts her head slowly when Iris enters, as though she has been napping. Beside her the television set flashes soundless pictures and Iris reaches over and snaps it off.
    “How are you, Mom?” she asks, crossing to her mother, bending and kissing her forehead. Her mother looks down with quavering head at her body, so wasted now that it barely disturbs the afghan.
    “I’m not well at all,” she says, smiling — she’s making a joke. She turns her head to the window, sighing, and for an instant Iris sees the woman her mother used to be, the fine nose, the high cheekbones, the patrician mouth. How haughty she could be, Iris remembers with a trace of irritation. “I’m going to die soon,” her mother says.
    “I’m sorry I didn’t come last week,” Iris explains. Confronted by her mother’s frailty, she’s overcome with her failures as a daughter. “I’m really sorry,” she says again, meaning it this time. Her mother observes her, and Iris is surprised to see how blue her eyes are today. It seems to Iris that the colour has been progressively leached from them over the years she has been here, as all excess flesh has slowly melted from her bones.
    “I’ve never been so tired in all my days.”
    Iris recognizes this as something she has heard before, as far back as she can remember, whenever her mother had finished the canning, or the spring cleaning, or given a family dinner. “Where’s Barney?”
    “At the ranch.”
    “What ranch? His father’s?”
    “No, ours.” She pulls the visitor’s chair closer to her mother’s, seats herself, and leans forward to take her mother’s hand in hers.
    “What’s this?” her mother asks, her eyes widening. Iris has told her about the ranch, more than once, as a matter of fact, but she explains again.
    “Barney bought a ranch late last fall, and now he’s calving so he’s there all the time —” She wants to go on, she wants to tell her mother everything, suddenly tears prickle behind her eyelids. She wants to say,
He’s left me, Mom,
even though she knows Barney would deny this, and her mother would not say,
I told you he’s not one of us,
although this is what she’d always thought, had barely troubled to hide behind the cool formality with which she’d treated Barney. Her mother’s hand is cold and Iris rubs gently to warm it. She lifts her eyes and finds her mother staring at her in that piercing way she always had whenever she suspected there was something going on that Iris didn’t want her to know about. But now Iris sees a remoteness, a distance, as if Iris is some woman her mother hardly knows and is only moderately interested in. In an unexpected flash she sees too in her