Ms. Giraud’s son Mathieu arrived around eleven in the morning. He parked a fancy grey car in the alleyway, walked up the doorsteps and rang the bell. Josh was the one who opened.

“Hello,” he said in an approximate French, “you must be Mathieu! Welcome. Your mom is in the living room.”

The man raised an eyebrow and asked with a tone of disdain: “And who might you be? Some kind of nurse, is it?”

Josh was a bit taken aback. “You can say that,” he said, perplexed. His French was not good enough to establish a proper defense. Damn! His mom was right, he was a piece of work. “I am Josh. I help Ms. Giraud with tasks that she can not do.”

Mathieu scanned what he could see from the entrance and stared down at Josh. “Well,” he said, “you seem to have made yourself pretty comfortable with the place.” He went inside and patted Josh’s shoulder as he passed him. “There’s cake in the trunk of the car, if you want to make yourself useful. We’ll have it for dessert.” Then in a few long steps he was in the next room, greeting his mother in the most patronizing way one could think of. Josh was still at the door, caught by surprise by the guy’s attitude.

What a jerk! Ms. Giraud had said he was a bit hard-headed, not condescending prick. This was gonna be a long day.

Ms. Giraud had been sitting in the living room all morning. She was taking up knitting again, saying it was ‘one of the most useful activities you could do while sitting on your ass’. As she was spending less and less time up and walking, she had found necessary to switch gears, spend more time doing arts and crafts and less gardening. Josh was doing the weeding and watering now.

When Josh came back from the kitchen, having recovered the cake from Mathieu’s car, the man was talking abundantly about how awful the road was. He seemed to be a person who liked to complain a lot. He was sitting in a grey couch that took up a good third of the room, having dropped his things around. He didn’t seem to have taken a lot of time to enquire about Ms. Giraud’s health. Josh shook his head: there was no need to antagonize that man. He was Ms. Giraud’s precious son and he would be gone in a few hours. He decided to say polite, pulled a chair out of the kitchen and sat down.

Mathieu was asking questions about how his mother lived her life. He didn’t pay attention to Josh more than he would have a servant of the house. Given his attitude, that was probably what he thought about Josh, more or less. Still, it wasn’t so bad to let the jerk focus on someone else.

“So,” said Mathieu to his mother, “can you still make food, or do you need help for that too?”

“Oh, I know how to cook pretty well, thank you,” said Ms. Giraud, apparently not surprised by how he was talking down to her. She dishes out some comments of her own. “Don’t you remember who fed you all these years? You say I don’t move much, but at least I still have memories.”

What an inspiring parent and child relationship.

“Well, I come by to say hello and it turns out you’re not using the stairs anymore! One gets to wonder what else could have gone wrong.”

Ms. Giraud shrugged. “I use the stairs when I need to. You get to eighty years old and we’ll see how you stay in shape.”

Mathieu opened his hands in confirmation of what she said. “That’s just it, mom, you’re almost eighty. Maybe you could start growing up a little? Who lives alone in a two-stories house at that age? You’re just exhausting yourself and taking unnecessary risks. You’re a bit old to live your way without thinking of others.”

Ms. Giraud clicked her tongue. “Don’t you get started with that again. You don’t get to hand me over to a retirement home. What are you complaining about? I don’t recall seeing you nursing me, or even helping me out around the house. Now you say it’s too much work to take care of me? I can take care of myself, thank you.”

“I’m saying,” says Mathieu, “that if a time comes where you’re having real problems, you’ll be on your own. How will you manage then, huh? It’s one thing to live at your own pace with the helper to bring your things, but it’s another to face health problems head-on without even having a backup plan. It’s a recipe for disaster.”

“In case you haven’t noticed,” she said, “I’m not alone.” Ms. Giraud gave a nod towards Josh, who was increasingly uncomfortable with the conversation. “Josh has helped me a great deal around the house.”

“Yeah, him,” said Mathieu as if Josh wasn’t there, “where did you pick him up? I don’t think he’s a certified nurse, is he? He doesn’t even speak proper French.”

That was it for Josh. He was strongly compelled to just grab the man, put him back in his fancy car and send him off with a middle finger. Diplomacy. Diplomacy was the way to go. “Ms. Giraud?” he said, in the best French he could muster. “Do I answer or will you do it?”

Ms. Giraud made a gesture as if to gently shut him up. Surely she had her fair share of children fighting. “Mathieu, if you came here to be rude and annoying, you can go. Otherwise, you can apologize to Josh and we’ll go and eat the fine meal he helped preparing. No matter what mood you’re in, I certainly didn’t raise you to frown upon the people who feed you. So?”

Awkwardly, Mathieu turned towards Josh. “I wasn’t speaking against you personally,” he said, “this is just family matters.” Well, that really wasn’t an apology.

“Mathieu,” said Ms. Giraud, coldly looking at him. “Say you’re sorry.”

“What?” said Mathieu, trying to keep composure as he was being handled like a five years old. “No! I mean, I said it, it wasn’t personal, I’m sorry he took it the wrong way.”

“Now you’re just being a dick,” she said. “Apologize to him, not me.”

Mathieu rolled his eyes. Another one of his mother’s antics, really. He dealt with the shame by acting like it was no big deal. “OK, well… hm, Josh, I’m sorry,” he said. He turned to Ms. Giraud. “You happy now?”

Josh kept a poker face on, but inside he was laughing at the humiliation Mathieu had to face. ‘Serves him right,’ he thought. Hearing a really old woman call her son a dick was also part of the fun.

Mathieu’s less-than-heartfelt apology closed the incident and soon they set up the living room table for lunch. They usually ate in the kitchen, but a family lunch was fancy enough to mandate the nice decorated plates and the matching cutleries. What was the use for these things if you never used them? They even got the napkins out.

Throughout lunch, they only had small talk. Mathieu’s big opinion on everything had been dampened by the previous argument. He was being careful and probably saw himself as thoughtful. They talked about the weather and how dry this year had been. They wished the best for the upcoming one. To Josh, this was a saddening bore. He knew Ms. Giraud well enough now and she wasn’t like that. She wasn’t this complaining old woman who couldn’t stand up for herself. She was brave, clever, she knew just what to say to get people out of trouble. Mathieu wasn’t just annoying or rude: he seemed to damage everything she was.

The man couldn’t stay on a defeat. After lunch, he decided that gardening was the big thing his mom couldn’t do without him. He turned on the hedge trimmer and started to cut everything into square, not minding what his mother was saying about liking her garden a little bit on the wild side. Josh tried to intervene, but Ms. Giraud stopped him with a look. She wanted it that way.

The day felt grimmer and grimmer except for Mathieu, who seemed to have regained the control and power that he was so upset to have lost. He congratulated his mom and himself on a job well done, carrying the twigs into a big wood pile. Did anyone actually trim their hedges in December? It looked all weird. Mathieu, still glowing from his success and general obliviousness for what anyone else was feeling, started gathering his things. Thank God he was on the leave.

Before he went away he had to come back to what was on his mind. “You know, mom,” he said, smiling, “one day you’ll be very happy to have nice ladies taking care of you, instead of having to be alone in such an empty house. You’ll say: ‘Hey! Maybe Mathieu was onto something.’”

“We’ll see about that,” said Ms. Giraud. She looked incredibly tired, but she smiled at her eldest.

“Such a temperament,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Well, take care then.”

She waved at him. “You take care on the road.”

They went back inside the house and she had to sit. Soon after she said she was going to sleep for the day. Good thing that Mathieu didn’t come more often.

He had almost succeeded in making her the old woman he thought she was.