My mother masks her creeping frailty behind a fraying quirkiness. She lives a couple of hours away from me in a shambled two-story colonial to which she’s laid siege at 1735 Asylum Avenue. It’s the home to which she brought her babies from the hospital. It’s the home that I left to after I graduated from college. It’s the home where my wedding dress hung on the living room mantle while I got ready. It’s the home where my father died.

It was once a house bulging with the cacophony of industry—the ratatatat of my father the accountant’s adding machine, the thick-as-molasses voices of kids reciting stem-changing Spanish verbs at my mother’s summer school. I’d sit at the top of the basement stairs listening to her drill her hapless students like the master sergeant she was meant to be.

When she retired as a Spanish teacher, she forged a new and exciting career as a court interpreter. Her specialties were drug busts and juvenile cases. A judge once scolded her for interfering with a 15 year-old’s sentencing. “Pobresito,” my mother interrupted. “Poor kid, he didn’t mean it.” It wasn’t the first time my mother was in contempt of something.

When her legs worked, my non-driving mother crisscrossed Connecticut on Amtrak and Greyhound to get to far-flung courts in Waterbury and New Haven. Though she’d never admit it, she was a callejera—someone who liked to be out and about. And for years I was her callejera-in-training on the streets of Downtown Hartford. Saturday afternoons we set out looking for bargains and chicken salad sandwiches in Sage-Allen’s basement. Sage-Allen may have been G. Fox’s poor cousin, but it was the only place in town to get a raspberry soda to go with our sandwiches. And their coffee was my mother’s reliable laxative.

Sage-Allen is long gone. A few years into retirement, my mother replaced the store’s coffee with something she needed more—adrenalin—the adrenalin of processing sixteen arraignments after a night of drug busts. My mother the translator was as quick as ticker tape. Including the Portuguese my mother learned years ago from our house cleaner, she knows a suspect’s rights in three languages.

And she knows her rights too. She’s not budging from Asylum Avenue. She’s not transferring power of attorney to her adult children. If it comes down to it, she’ll get to a bill on second or third notice. She’s not in a hurry anymore. If someone wants to learn Spanish from her, he sits at the dining room table where she props up a book of Post-it-Notes as big as a blackboard. Behind her, she’s tacked up a gag sign that says, “Parking for Cubans Only.”

Yes, my mother the callejera, is now parked. She’s mostly parked in a recliner that plugs into the wall. A push of the button will practically eject her from her seat like a cartoon character—spiral jack and all. When she’s not sitting in the den watching her novellas, she’s parked in the chair lift that first scarred the wall when it was installed for my father. After he died, Mom couldn’t bear to see it anymore. Eight years later, she had a newer model reinstalled. I think she takes joy rides in that chair.

My mother lives amidst the shambles of her own making and fantasies of her own necessity. She wants to paint the house, fix the crumbling concrete front steps, install central air. None of that will happen. Nor will she swap out her antique boiler for natural gas. Life is just so on Asylum Avenue. And life two hours away from Asylum Avenue is waiting for my mother to run out of heating oil, for her cable cum lifeline to go out or for my mother to fall as if she were the star of a bad commercial.

Life a car ride away from my mother is waiting for shambles to become ruins.