My mother can't say 'flapjack stack'. It's her meds.

We talk almost daily, in the aftermath of her fourth bypass last month, and the new pacemaker. There is no surgery left to do, nothing left to work with. They won't open me up again, she says. No muscle any more. Her heart is all stretched tympani and thinned  reflexes.

So she has bad days, bad nights, gets admitted again, and they adjust her meds. And we talk about it. I have her hospital number in my fingertips. Exigencies with insurance mean we never know if she will be there, or abruptly sent home. I wonder if they aren't running her back and forth just to use her up.

I have a role: I am witty and irreverent. I am unafraid to joke about death, unlike my siblings, and she gets silly. I ask her about the things she will do this summer, her lonely porch tomato, baked every year in West Palm. I send her live potted herbs, tell her not to pick the leaves until it grows. She does anyway, and they never thrive. We pretend she will care for them next time.

Everything is funny. The doctor's diagnosis: she's old. She says if all they can do is give her drugs it's a good time to try heroin. She erupts with non-sequitors, hoping to keep the hilarity alive, and I do it just right, I don't force it, wait for the funny stuff to occur to me in turn, and it always does.

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When I was 12, at one of our rentals houses -- a new one every year -- I slept with  my older brother in the attic room. She would haul out her big makeup bag, to get ready for her long days away. "Extra shifts". and "You want me to make money, right?"

I lay on the floor, doing anything, saying anything, to make her laugh, to delay her. I saved my best material til she was doing something tricky, mascara in the corners.

"Stop it! I'll pee my pants!"

She dressed like a pudgy Twiggy. Cocktail waitress allure, in azure metallic eye shadow and faux go-go leopard skin skirts.

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We talk now about mistakes, but only the funny ones. I relive for her my infamies. I was the 14 year old who chopped blocks of candle wax with a dull hand-axe, on the dining room table, thinking wadded newspapr would protect the veneer maple underneath. Stupid boy. She sort of remembers the where and when, but clearly recalls the smacked agog-ity on my face as the shredded Kansas City Times was swept away, the gouges laid bare.

I make her remember her balletic inability in Beatle boots, back when, especially on that grey midwestern ice. The chocolate bangs that hid her eyes, the great hoop earrings. You can't lose those, she says, they're too big. You hear them hit the floor, I say. I miss those, she says. We wait for that to pass.

We share: the busted-up blue-and-dead-metal VW bug she had for a while, in '67, that needed the thing jiggled every time, while she pumped the gas. I tell her that back seat wasn't funny, the rusted holes, the tempting blacktop inches away, blurring by. One toe, just to feel it go by. Always wanting to, always resisted, that rush of reality below us.

"I don't know what happens when people die," she says one day, and then says something else.

Only the funny stuff; the slightly painful, perhaps. Calculated stand-ins for the Real Stuff, the stuff that won't ever be funny. Sitting on the punishment stool, on a thick yellow pages, my father holding my jaw open, gripping one twig wrist, my mother, in petticoats, pushing one, two, three brussels sprouts down my throat. Clamping my mouth shut until I swallow, and even then, as i vomit into my cheeks, until it is all gone.

We won't talk about the lists she used to keep, surrendered to my dad, that meant the belt at the end of burnt-red and voluptuous summer days. Bed without dinner, before 6 pm, on my belly so the little red crisscrosses don't stain the sheet.

We won't talk about her addiction, her shock therapy. Her boyfriends -- after she left Him --  the ones who came home with her, and never came back. The empty refrigerators. The winter of 8th grade, without a coat. The tricks and evictions and empty rooms.

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The past is a dresser's dummy. We take turns adorning it, fitting things carefully, tugging things down, pinning it tight, tailoring our stories to make it look proper.

We talk nearly every day, so I can see if the hole in her heart is worse. I ask about her night, if she slept, and she tells me about her favorite shows. She likes Lou Dobbs, shares his fear of rude intrusion, foreign elements, and porous borders.

We pat down her terrors, her with new age mendacity, me with banal topics, inquiries about her other children. She has to console them, soothe them, but with me she is wicked. Laughs at her hopelessness, makes fun of her doctors, rants at the insurance company and Medicaid.

I give her solace, with my pretense about coming to terms, with pale fire, for all our pastel mistakes, and we fill in the dark patches with fables about daily decline. We both pretend she paid attention, back when, that she is attended by her funny, grateful son. That she earned it, and did her best.

From time to time she apologizes, out of nowhere, about nothing at all, but she means it, and I accept it, and I mean it, for it is a jewel in my heart.