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nursing home — but even the cat understood that my father could not place his mother in an institution.
    It was against his religion. Greeks just didn’t
do
things like that. They were too cheap — that’s what has always kept their families together. The whole notion of the nursing
     home was something dreamed up by people like my mother; American women with sunglasses, always searching for their tanning
     lotion or cigarette lighters. He couldn’t evict his mother, but neither could he care for her. The conflict divided our family
     into two distinct camps. My mother and sisters scraped bread dough off their heels in one corner, while my brother, father,
     and I jangled our change in the other. The children formed a committee, meeting in the driveway to discuss our parents’ certain
     divorce. It was reported by scouts positioned outside the bedroom that my mother had thrown what sounded like an ashtray.
     A reconnaissance unit was sent and returned carrying a battered clock radio and the real estate section of the newspaper,
     the margins penciled with our mother’s trademark series of stars and checks. How many bedrooms did the apartment have? Who
     would she take with her when she left? If we went with our father and Ya Ya, we could be assured of our privacy — but what
     did it matter, when our mother’s attention was what we lived for?
    “Tell that cow of yours to tone it down a little,” my mother would shout from her stool in the breakfast nook. “They can hear
     her chewing her goddamned cud all the way to the state line.”
    “Oh, Sharon,” my father would sigh.
    “Oh, Sharon, my fat ass,” my mother would shout, dashing her plate across the counter and onto the floor. Moments later she
     would rethink her exact wording, adding, “It’s fat, my ass, but not as big as the can on that prize heifer you’ve got shoveling
     down three sacks of clover she harvested from the Kazmerzacks’ front yard, mama’s boy.”
    My mother had a wealthy aunt, a calculating and ambitious woman who had married the founders of two Cleve-land department
     stores. The woman died paranoid and childless, leaving the bulk of her estate to my mother, her sister, and a handful of nieces.
     Having money of her own provided my mother with a newfound leverage. She took to wandering the house in a white mink cape,
     reading aloud from the various real estate brochures provided by a man who arrived late one afternoon introducing himself
     as her broker.
    “This one’s got a full-sized redwood sauna, separate bed-rooms for each of my children,
and
a view of the distant volcanoes. It reads ‘Divorcées welcome, no Greeks allowed.’ Oh, it sounds
perfect!
Don’t you think?”
    The money made her formidable, and within a month, it was decided that Ya Ya would be sent to a nursing home. My father packed
     her belongings into the station wagon, and we followed behind in my great aunt’s Cadillac, fighting over who would use the
     fake-fur throw.
    She went first to a private facility, where she shared a room with a sprightly, white-haired lunatic named Mrs. Denardo, who
     crept out of bed late at night to shit in the hamper and hide Ya Ya’s dentures in the chilly tank of the toilet.
    “I’m the stepsister of Jesus Christ sent back to earth to round up all the lazy, goddamned niggers and teach them to cook
     ribs the way they was meant to be cooked, goddamnit.”
    We were enchanted and took to giving her the gifts meant for Ya Ya.
    “What’s this? A sack of almonds, you say? You can take these and shove them right up your puckered pooholes for all I care.
     I don’t want nuts, motherfucker, I want drapes and shoes to match.”
    Ya Ya complained strenuously, but lost in the energetic saga of her roommate, my siblings and I never paid any attention.
     We organized a variety show tailored to Mrs. Denardo’s exotic tastes and practiced for weeks, moving from the song “Getting
     to Know You” to a dramatic re-enactment of