The apartment was on the second floor of a building that had been nice once. Tessa unlocked the door quietly, out of habit, though her mother had been awake for an hour and was sitting up in bed with the television on low and her opinions ready.
You're late, Dorothy Quinn said.
I'm exactly on time. You just wake up earlier every month.
That's age, baby. Age and spite. Dorothy reached for the remote and turned the volume down two clicks, which was her way of making room in the conversation. "Coffee's too much trouble. Sit."
Tessa sat, still in her coat, on the edge of the bed, and took the hand her mother offered — thin, warm, the knuckles prominent — while the morning news did its bright, terrible parade on the little screen. Beside the bed, the oxygen concentrator hummed with the patience of a machine that had accepted its job. Neither the machine nor the woman it served was free.
Dorothy had been diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at fifty-one, in an emergency room at two in the morning, after a winter of telling her daughter she was fine. She had smoked in her twenties, quit in her thirties, and worked thirty years cleaning other people's houses; her lungs had kept the receipts for all of it. COPD was a slow negotiation, the specialist explained, in his office across town: the airways narrowing, the body bargaining for every breath, the good weeks and the bad nights and the long slope of it, managed, never reversed.
Managing it had a price list, and Tessa knew it the way she knew her route. The concentrator was a monthly rental. The tank refills. The inhalers — two kinds, one for maintenance and one for rescue, and the rescue one could not, under any circumstances, be allowed to run out. The specialist visits, quarterly, across town. The emergency trips, which came when they came — the breathing turning to a whistle, the whistle turning to a thin reedy panic in the dark, Tessa on the phone and then in the plastic chair in the ER at 3:00 in the morning, doing arithmetic nobody should have to do in a waiting room: what the visit would cost, what the missed shift would cost, what it would cost if she stopped.
She had made that calculation once, six years ago, in a hospital corridor, and then she had gone home and withdrawn from college.
She'd been twenty-six, two years into a music program she'd won on scholarship — not a full ride, never a full ride, but enough, with work-study and her mother's cleaning money and loans kept small and careful, to be possible. It had not mattered. What mattered was a doctor saying managing it, never reversed, and a mother saying I'm fine, baby, don't you dare, in a voice that ran out of air on the fourth word.
She had left school in the middle of a semester. The scholarship office had been kind. The loans had not. Six years later she was still paying on an education she hadn't finished, in monthly installments that arrived with the reliability of weather.
Dorothy knew all of it, and it was the one ledger in the apartment never spoken of plainly. Instead it came out sideways, in Dorothy's humor, which was intact and sharp as a razor in a failing body.
You work too much, she said now, studying Tessa's face. "You got your granddaddy's knees and my forehead and a job that treats you like furniture. Something in this family is going to have to give, and it isn't going to be me, because I'm comfortable."
You're comfortable with an oxygen tube in your nose?
I'm comfortable being right. Dorothy squeezed her hand. "There's a difference and you know it."
The morning ritual ran its course: Tessa made tea because coffee stirred Dorothy's cough; checked the rescue inhaler by weight, shaking it gently by her ear; set out the day's medications in the little divided box. Dorothy watched all of it with the air of a queen watching a trusted servant.
You humming in your sleep again, Dorothy said, casual as weather, while Tessa was at the sink.
I don't hum in my sleep.
You do. Tuesday. I heard you through the wall. Dorothy smiled into her tea. "His Eye Is on the Sparrow, if I'm not mistaken. And I am never mistaken about that song. Your Mr. Bennett" — she said it with formal respect for the dead — "would have had something to say about you wasting it on a wall."
I sing at work sometimes. Nobody hears.
Mm. Dorothy set her cup down with care, because her hands shook in the mornings. "Baby, I have known you since you were the size of a loaf of bread. You don't sing for nobody. You sing because it's in you and it has to go somewhere. The only question I ever had was when you were going to stop pretending the somewhere didn't matter."
Tessa rinsed a cup and said nothing, because there was nothing she could say that her mother hadn't already heard in the silence.
I need to sleep, Tessa said. "Shift tonight."
You need to do a lot of things you put off, Dorothy said, and let her go, because she was not a woman who wasted breath — she couldn't afford to; she meant that more literally than anyone.
Tessa slept in the small room that had been hers since she was seventeen, with the curtains drawn against the day and the concentrator humming through the wall, steady as a second heartbeat. She dreamed in music. It was the one shift nobody could write her up for, and the only place left where she sang at full voice — in her sleep, in the dark, with her mother breathing in the next room, kept alive by machinery and a daughter who had given up everything except the humming.