The guest room on the first floor was the obvious choice.
It was directly across from the bathroom, which mattered enormously because chemotherapy produces a relationship with the bathroom that requires proximity, the specific urgent relationship of a body that is being treated with something powerful and that responds to that treatment in various unpleasant ways.
The room had a window that looked onto the backyard.
My mother had always liked the backyard.
We had a garden, which I maintained without particular skill but with genuine pleasure, and she would sometimes sit and watch me work in it when she visited, offering suggestions in the careful way of a woman who does not want to overstep but who cannot help knowing more about gardening than I do.
I brought her to the house on a Monday.
