10 McKenna
McKenna
When I walk into the house at the end of the day, I can’t wait to tell Glory about the first-year mentee I’m getting on the
team. According to Coach Cat, this girl chose Meadowbrook over one of the Ivies because she heard our team had better camaraderie.
But when I come bounding into the kitchen, I’m surprised to find it empty.
“Glory?” I call, moving toward her bedroom. The shades are drawn, making the room weirdly dark for this time of day. Still,
enough light is coming in under the curtains for me to tell no one’s there.
“Glory?” I call again, moving through the bedroom and pushing open the bathroom door. Empty. My heart starts to race. I don’t
know where she could have gone without her car. She’s never been the type to take a random evening walk around the neighborhood.
I race to the back door, and that’s when I see her.
She’s in our small patch of backyard, dressed in her pink bathrobe and slippers, surrounded by veritable carcasses of her beloved butterfly bushes.
They’ve all been uprooted and are lying scattered around the yard in a mess of haphazard twigs and wayward petals.
It looks like she’s been pulling the plants out of the soil one by one.
She’s now bent over a patch of lavender, yanking the sprigs from the ground, tossing her spoils behind her.
“Glory!” I shout, hurrying through the door and down the two concrete steps to the grass. “Glory! Stop!”
She doesn’t even look my way—just keeps at her task. She’s muttering something as she continues pulling out her plants as
if she’s on some kind of mission.
“Glory! What on earth are you doing?” At last I’m close enough to grab her arm.
She startles at the contact, finally pausing and looking up at me.
“What happened?” I ask. “Why are you destroying the garden?”
She stares at me for a long, hard moment, and the dread I was feeling inside grows even stronger.
“I . . .” she starts, looking back down to the ransacked flower bed. She turns again, taking in the chaos of the dismembered
weigela shrubs littering the ground around us. “No, I didn’t mean . . .” She kneels to the grass, lifting a small branch with
its pink flowers still attached, and runs her thumb and forefinger over the petals.
I don’t speak as I watch obvious regret take hold of her.
“Oh, dear.” She looks suddenly stricken. “They had only just reached full bloom.”
She gathers the nearby branches into a neater pile and then looks back up at me.
“Oh, McKenna.”
Her eyes are wet.
“Glory, what happened?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have the foggiest notion. I don’t even remember coming out here.” Her eyes scan the scene around us again. “But now I’ve ruined them all.” She stands and begins moving around the yard, collecting more scattered pieces of her beloved bushes.
“I’ll get a trash bag,” I say, hurrying back inside to the cabinet under the sink.
Once we’ve finished cleaning the yard, I convince Glory to wait until morning to tidy up the ravaged patch of dirt that was
the flower bed. Instead, she follows me back into the house and asks me to wait for her at the kitchen table.
I can hear her changing clothes in her bedroom, and then the bathroom sink turns on. I imagine she’s washing the topsoil from
her hands and forearms, scrubbing beneath her fingernails. When she emerges, looking fresh as morning, I wish with all my
heart that we could pretend everything was normal. But it’s clear she and I both know otherwise.
“It’s time for us to have a difficult conversation,” she says, taking the seat opposite me at the worn kitchen table.
“I know,” I say as a tear slips from my eye.
“Something hasn’t been right with me for a long while. We both know it, and it’s time we accept it. You don’t deserve this.
I promised myself that after all the years you spent being your mother’s caretaker, I’d never put you in that position again.
I shouldn’t have allowed it to go this far.” She takes in a deep breath and squares her shoulders. “But I’ve made arrangements,
and it’s time for us to act on them.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“I’ve been saving. So I wouldn’t be a burden on you. My doctor warned me months ago, but it’s taken me some time to come to terms with it. I’m old, McKenna. Bits and pieces wear out. I wish it were any body part other than my brain, but we don’t always get to choose, do we?”
“What are you saying?”
“It’s dementia. And it’s only going to get worse. There have been times recently when I’ve found myself somewhere in the house,
and I don’t know how I got there, as if I’ve woken up from sleepwalking. It’s like I’ve been listening to the car radio and
getting farther and farther away from town. I can still hear the song that’s playing, but each moment the music keeps getting
fuzzier, and I don’t even notice how loud the static’s getting. But then I drive through a brief stretch of road where the
reception’s still good, and only then do I realize how fuzzy the music was all along.”
My tears are flowing freely now.
She reaches across the table for my hand.
“I’ve made arrangements,” she says again. “I made you a file, a binder, with our financial information. Everything you could
need. The bank accounts, insurance information, important documents, all in one place. It’s in my nightstand. I’ve picked
out a memory care facility nearby that I know has space. It’s time.”
“What? Glory, no. If you need help, we’ll get you an aide, someone to stay in the house with you. There are services, companies
that place home health workers.”
“No, I don’t want that. The longer we leave this, the more I’m going to need. I want to move out while I can still participate
in what’s happening, set up my new surroundings, get to know some of the staff as my real self.”
“But I can help take care of you here.” Even as I say it, I know it’s not true.
“No, you can’t. You have your own life, school, swimming, work. It’s too much, and I won’t allow it. My mind is made up.”
I know better than to keep arguing. Instead, I wipe at the wetness under my eyes.
“But how will we even afford that?” I ask.
“You aren’t to give that one second’s thought.” She pats my hand. “I’ve got everything worked out. It’s all in the binder.”
Everything she’s saying makes sense. She will get better care in a facility, access to more resources, and a faster response
in an emergency, but I’m not ready to let her go.
Before I can stop myself, I’m shouting.
“No, Glory! Fuck that!” I’m out of my seat. “We’re not doing this!” I can see everything she’s envisioning about her future,
and I just can’t accept it.
She lets out a long sigh and gives me a knowing look. “If you could please get ahold of yourself. It’s not the time for one
of your outbursts.”
Her calmness somehow emphasizes that this conversation is too important for me to let my temper get the better of me. I nod,
sorry to have yelled, sorry for the foul language.
I sit back down and she starts again.
“You’ll be able to visit me every day if you want. And you’ll know I’m resting easier because I did what I believed was best
for both of us.”
Another sob escapes me.
“Now come, give me a hug,” she says. “Then rinse the tears off your face and help me make dinner.”
Less than a week later, I’m out for breakfast with Lark and Rae.
So much has already changed. I’ve been trying to compartmentalize, to keep my grief tucked away, locked in a little box to the side of my heart.
I allow myself to visit those feelings for only a small portion of each day.
And breakfast with my friends isn’t one of the approved times for indulging in self-pity.
Instead of talking about how crushing it felt to move Glory into the facility, I stick to lighter subjects, like our meet
schedule for the fall and the new moisturizer Rae’s trying for her chlorine rash.
It’s not quite eight a.m. yet, and the Scoop & Sizzle is pretty empty. We just finished practice, and with the way the diner
has cranked up the AC this morning, I regret leaving my hair down to soak the back of my tank top. At the booth across from
us, a woman in a pastel blazer appears to be having a business meeting with an older man, and down toward the other end of
the restaurant, three women in scrubs chat quietly over scrambled eggs. I scoot a little closer to Lark on the vinyl bench,
hoping to avoid the direct flow from the vent above me. Lark’s long braids are twisted into a layered bun on top of her head,
and her brown skin is flushed a tawny bronze from the morning’s exertion.
Rae reaches across the table toward Lark’s plate. Lark swats her fingers away, but not before Rae has gotten a French fry
firmly in her grasp.
“Mine!” Lark says firmly, like a toddler hoarding toys. The dimple on Rae’s left cheek deepens as she winks and pops the fry
into her mouth, laughing as Lark lets out an affronted yelp.
Ours is the only table with any sort of energy, probably because we’ve spent the past two hours practicing sprints in the nippy seventy-seven-degree water of the Meadowbrook pool, and now our endorphins are running high.
The exercise does help to distract me from focusing on Glory.
Our usual six a.m. practice started at five this morning because the university needed the pool for some special event today, and the early wake-up has made us all a bit slaphappy.
“Breakfast of champions,” I say, reaching out and taking a fry from Lark too, just to mess with her.
“You guys are the worst,” she says, but there’s no bite to it.
“Who gets fries for breakfast?” I laugh back.
“Well, maybe if you started bringing us some leftovers from haute Hollyhock, I could upgrade my dietary choices. But nope, you’re all, ‘I can’t steal food from the club to feed the team,’” Lark says,
as if I’m the one who’s ridiculous, though she’s smiling as she shakes her head. “Like I said, you’re the worst.”
But when her eyes catch on her cell phone sitting beside her plate, her smile slips. “Actually, you know who really is the worst?” She picks up a fry and points it at the phone. “Darian.”