She takes off her biker-style sunglasses the doctor said she must wear after her cataract operation. One eyelid is stitched up (it was drooping): Want me to fix that, too, while I'm at it? the doctor asked. She looks like a victim of abuse with that shiner. It rains harder now: the rain beats down, rushing like the sound from a shell held to your ear, drowning out the moans and groans and hiss. She sits up. I guess I'll go to bed, she says, just past noon. It thunders again. The rain lets up. The marigolds my father wanted to plant are drenched. At least he won't have to water them.

The girls are here, he announced when I arrived in an airport limousine. He doesn't remember my name but I look familiar to him and he hugs me and then sits down in his chair again. When I leave the room to put my suitcase away, he asks my mother, Where is he? She looks at him. She doesn't correct his grammar.

She takes off her watch when she goes to bed and can't find it in the morning. She looks at me, wondering if I'm thinking she's losing it, too. I know it's around here somewhere, she says. I never lose my watch, she reassures me. We go out to lunch. He holds up the menu as if he was seriously considering all the options in this 24-hour restaurant, but he orders the same thing. Rhonda, the waitress, writes down "Pancake Special" before he speaks but is still polite to ask. Then I notice my mother's watch on his wrist and signal her with my eyes. We don't say a word.

At night he sits on the edge of his bed a long time trying to figure how to get into his bed. It's a huge puzzle. I check back a half hour later and he's in bed but in a predicament. His head is propped up on the headboard, and he can't figure how to slide down so his head's on the pillow. I'm going to pull your leg, I laugh, and I do. He smiles. His head goes down on the pillow and he falls asleep.

I brush my teeth and grimace. Must be some generic brand toothpaste, I sigh, then gasp, realizing I had just brushed my teeth with extra-strength, new and improved Ben Gay.

When my mother was having her operation, I brought him a huge tray of marigolds for planting. Just looking at them cheered him up. He was quite a gardener in his time, my mother says as she looks at him two days later, struggling with a hoe. I had dumped bags of topsoil on the Florida white sand and asked him to get a shovel from the shed. He was gone a long time. When I looked in to see, I found him picking up tool after tool and puzzling. Is this it? he asked me, holding up a hammer. He does a careful job spreading the soil and then I direct him to make a hole with a hoe for me to put the flowers in. Making a deep enough space takes three tries each time. By the sixth planting, he's exhausted. Damn, he sighs, I can't. I try to sit him down in a chair at the edge of the garden, but he heads for his chair in the living room and falls asleep.

At 2:30 in the night, I get up with my mother to give her pills and put her in her rocker. She's in pain. We see him in his chair, fully dressed. He thinks it's morning, she says. We confuse him. He looks at us, as if wondering if he has on the proper attire. He wants to be correct. He's not sure. I don't say anything. I walk her back to bed. The next time she awakens in pain, I see him in his pajamas. He gets up at noon. I can't figure whether to give him breakfast or lunch. I can't tell if it's night or day. They doze off and on all day. Hmmmmmmmmmm. Ah-hisssss. Hmmmmmmmmm. Ah-hisssss. This is their conversation.

Each day one or the other walks to the mailbox. Sometimes both. Never together. Receiving junk mail is an event. They don't even get bills. Everything's paid in full. And no one writes except Cousin Edith from Brandon, Vermont. She always writes on a note card with the picture of a pig to remind my mother of Mary Jane, the farmhouse pig-pet Uncle Frank served at Sunday dinner during hard times. My mother cannot read Cuz's writing but she smiles at the picture of the pig and just knowing Edith wrote.

They keep the central air conditioning I convinced her to get at 80 degrees--and they're still cold. They wear sweaters when I turn the temperature down to 78. I sweat. I sniff: the house smells like Ben Gay.

The television news goes on at 6:00. Dan Rather and Connie Chung appear in their living room. And Jeopardy at 7:00. And then a movie or Perry Mason reruns or a cop show. On Saturday night, Lawrence Welk reruns. Weekdays, "The Young and Restless" at 1:00. On Tuesday afternoon, she asks me, "Did you ever watch Archie Bunker?" I turn around and there he is in the living room, on screen. "I don't like Archie Bunker," I say, immediately biting my tongue & scolding myself: why did I have to let that out. She retreats. I'll turn it off, she says. No, I say, handing her a cup of tea in a violet-flowered bone china cup given to her by her sister, one cup each year on my mother's birthday for the last ten years of my Aunt Madge's life. She died looking into a mirror while trying to put on a necklace to go out to breakfast.

I can't tell night from day here or one meal from another. These days my father eats half what he used to eat, and she's the same. All day, she plans dinner. In the morning, she asks me what I want for dinner. She makes lists: dinner menus, what to buy at the grocery store, what pills to order, what doctor to call. Every night they eat at 5:00 p.m. They aren't hungry. I bravely suggest that they eat at 6:00. She raises her stitched brow. But we've always eaten at 5:00 except when I was working and then we ate at 6:00, she says. But maybe you'd be hungrier at 6:00, I continue, gently suggesting a change, and you wouldn't have to get up for your snack in the night, I add. I keep going. You could have dinner with the 6:00 o'clock news and use your TV trays. We do that on Sunday, she replies. Well, why not during the week, too? I ask. What I say sounds reasonable to her, I can see, and I also see I've cornered her. But I like to get it over with, she explains, so I have the evening. I don't reply.

My mother checks her pill supply. Does she need to place an order? She lines up the bottles and talks aloud to herself as she arranges her assorted pills (pink, orange, blue) (circles and oblongs) in a silver-plated pillbox for the next day. I add a new pill, a large brown capsule of concentrated Ginseng, to give her more energy. She doesn't put it in her pillbox. I bring it to her in the morning. She takes it for three mornings and on the fourth she tells me she thinks that's the cause of her all-night spells of diarrhea. I go to the drugstore and buy her Pepto Bismal, which she takes and is immediately relieved. I take the Ginseng.

There's never enough light in the house. I can't see, I say. My mother says she can see just fine. I strain my eyes to read and write. She replaced all the overhead lights with ceiling fans to cut down on the air conditioning. But she never turns the fans on. I don't dare turn them on myself because each one has a different electrical connection problem. Don't ever turn this one on with the wall switch. Use this pull chain but not the short one. Or is it the long one? That's the dining room. I never can remember what the rules are. And the kitchen one has a different problem. And she never wants the fan on in the dining room because it would cool the dinner off. Even if the dinner is cold (tuna salad, etc.), the rule applies. So what's left for lighting? Old table lamps with dim light and hard-to-turn-on-switches. When I try to remove one end table lamp that doesn't work at all (see, I say, this one doesn't even work), she tells me that lamp has sentimental value and she'll get it rewired. The one attempt she made at purchasing a reading light was a failure. She bought it through a Master Card advertisement in the mail and when it came, she saw it wasn't right but what could she do? Return it, I reply. Well, it's too late now, she smiles and shrugs as we both look at it: a rusted chrome pole wobbling in the night, sending out a blinding glare worse than a floodlight. The bugs love it.

I hear my mother up and down all night. She cheats and lifts one eye-patch and sneaks in and out of her bed, trying not to wake me. I awaken with the sound of a crash: a thud, broken glass. So she's not so smart. Why does she have to be so independent, I get up and say, only to find it's my father on the floor, flat out. He's in another one of his predicaments. He looks up at me, "I can't get up," he says. My mother awakens, tense, startled, and draws in her breath. I pick up the broken glass from the chimney of a milk glass lamp, circa 1950. There were three of those lamps, my mother tells me. They're as old as Wayne's first marriage. (Wayne is Aunt Madge's son. He was married three times.) We've each knocked one off in the night, my mother continues. This is the last one, she announces. I put one of my father's hands on the dresser corner and the other on the bedpost. Then I try to lift him from under his arms. Ready? I ask. He doesn't answer. He tries to pull himself up. He can't. He's dead weight. I have a bad back. We're not going anywhere. Finally, I heave him up and he rocks back and forth on his cradle-shaped feet, then steadies himself and returns to bed where he tries to tell me something.

His voice is nearly gone. I pull back my hair and place my ear close to his whisper. What? What did you say? Exhausted, he gives up and falls asleep. For the first time, he pees in his bed. I wash his clothes, his sheets. He may never need diapers, Ray, the former policeman-turned-social worker who comes to bathe my father twice a week, says. This may be the only time, he adds, handing my mother a pink rose in full bloom. Ready for your bath? Ray beams. Yes, Sir, my father laughs.

It's raining again, thundering now. I'm on the porch with the old box fan on Do you know how old that fan is? and rain pouring outside. Don't forget to close the windows. And then I'll go into the 80-degree closed-up house to check on my father and mother. Their dying is slow and quiet and uneventful, like a gradual darkening of the Florida sky. My father looks up from his chair when I walk by. It's really raining, he says. I tell him the marigolds are getting drenched. He shrugs and says "I can't help it." I look in on my mother. She's sound asleep. I tiptoe past my father back out to the porch where I begin to yawn. Is old age contagious? I wonder. I consider standing in the rain to wake myself up. Instead, I head for my mother's chaise lounge, curl up, and fall asleep to the sound of the rain on the tin roof.