MUMMIE HAD THE TOY FOX IN bed with her at the hospital in Chapel Hill.

She was on morphine by then, pale as an ivory Quan Yin, and getting some things off her chest. She wanted me to know, for instance, that I had neglected to pay back the thousand dollars she had bailed me out with back in the day.

“That was my mad money,” she reminded me.

I told her I was mortified to hear that. I had just been careless.

“I want credit for getting you on your feet.”

I told her I would think of a way to do that.

“It isn’t about the money.”

“I know.”

I had wondered all these years, so I asked, “Why was it ‘mad money’?”

“Because it was mine.”

“I mean, where did you get it?”

Daddy had a Japanese sword, she said, a souvenir from the war that had been packed in the attic for years. She read somewhere that a knife-and-sword vendor was passing through town, and she wanted to see how much she could get for it. Daddy gave her permission and said she could keep whatever she got. She went down to the auditorium and talked with the dealer, and made a good deal. She kept that thousand dollars for years.

“It was the only money I’d earned since the war, so it meant something to me.”

I told her I was so sorry I hadn’t paid her back.

“And I want you to write a sweet book one day, something like The Snow Goose.” She had always loved Paul Gallico’s tale of a bitter hunchbacked artist who retreats to a lighthouse but is rescued by the love of a sweet young girl and a goose whose wing he mends before rowing troops to safety in the great evacuation at Dunkirk. I told her I would work on that. It stung a little to realize that she didn’t think of my current book as sweet—the one about the pot-growing transgender landlady who offers one last chance of love to a dying businessman. I had certainly been going for sweet.

“Do you want to see a trick?” she asked.

“Sure.”

She extended her leg from beneath the sheets and splayed out her toes in every direction, wiggling them. Each toe was its own little puppet show. It was mildly grotesque, not what I’d expected.

“I’ve always been able to do that,” she said proudly. “I did it for the nurses at the hospital on the day you were born.”

“Why? Because I was coming out backwards?”

“No! I wasn’t in labor yet. They were very impressed.”

She started wiggling her toes again, so I grabbed her foot and subdued it for a while. It was more intimate than anything I could possibly have imagined.

“It’s a very nice trick,” I said, still holding on.

It was devastating to think that she saved something from the very beginning to share with me at the very end.

“Go on, Teddy. Go home. Get some rest.”

I let her foot slip out of my hands.

“And come back early in the morning. I’ve got an orderly I want you to meet.”