My Mother At The Stove
She made a stew for the dinner. She would not let me peel a carrot. She stood at the Stanley with her back to me and she talked, and the talk went in a particular way, not a line from one subject to the next but a spiral, the way a woman talks when she has been on her own too long and has got used to finishing her own sentences. I sat at the table with the dog under it and I listened and I did not interrupt, because I had learned, somewhere in London, that you can get more out of people by not speaking than by speaking.
"The hospice is a nice place," she said. "It's a new build. They've the garden and all. There's a priest comes on a Wednesday, he's a young lad from Mayo, he has the two words of Irish. Your father likes him. Your father wouldn't have liked him forty years ago but he likes him now. He'll be saying rosaries if he's left at it. I never thought I'd see the day."
"And he's comfortable."
"He's comfortable enough. He's on the morphine now, only a small dose, a patch thing. They said they'd increase it when the time comes. The nurse Mairead is very good, she's a Corofin woman, she knew your aunt Bríd."
"I'll meet her tomorrow."
"You will."
She was stirring the stew with a wooden spoon that was worn to a half-moon on one side. There was a knot in the small of her back that I could see through the jumper, a small rise in the wool where the vertebrae were, and I