Chapter 10
WADE
Icalled the meeting for a Sunday at four, at my mother's, because it seemed to me that if you're going to talk about a woman's care you ought to do it in front of the woman.
Charmaine didn't want to come. She had a thing with Katie's team. I said it would take forty minutes and she said couldn't we just do it on the thread, and I said no.
Russ was on video, propped up on a stack of books on the sideboard so the camera got the room. Charmaine sat on the arm of the good chair. Benita had gone home at noon. Mom was in the recliner with her leg out and the walker parked where she could reach it without admitting she needed to reach it.
Gwen wasn't there. I'd asked if she wanted to come and she'd said, "Is my name on anything?" and I said no, and she said, "Then no."
I'd brought the whiteboard down from Charmaine's garage. Same board. I wiped it that morning at my own kitchen table. The marker ghost of the old grid was still faintly in it, the way it always is with those boards, and I stood looking at that a minute before I got in the truck.
I stood up to start, then had to sit back down to get the delivery ticket out of my shirt pocket, where I'd written it at four that morning, then stood up again. So that was the start.
"Okay. This is the summer. It's already running — I'm not proposing it, it started three weeks ago. I'm reading it out so it's in one place with everybody hearing it at the same — "
"Is this about that woman," my mother said.
"Ma."
"Because if this is about that woman, I've said what I have to say, and I said it to you in my kitchen."
"It's about all of it. Let me get through it once." I looked down at the ticket. Five things, written small, and the truck's dome light is no good, so the second line said something that was either hair or heat. "Give me a second."
Nobody said anything. Charmaine looked at her phone and then put it face down like she'd been caught at something.
I wrote as I went.
"Benita. Weekdays, eight to noon. Bathing Tuesday and Friday.
She does the transfers, she does the exercises the PT sends home, she does the meals for the day.
Paid three ways, Russ, Charmaine, me — twelve forty a week.
It stays in place as long as Mom needs it, the money stays three ways, and nobody renegotiates it in August when the novelty's worn off. "
"Fine," Russ said from the sideboard.
"Fine," Charmaine said.
"Me. Tuesdays and Thursdays, all day. PT drives, pharmacy, appointments, the shopping, whatever's broken. I've got the pill organizer in my truck. I fill it Sunday nights."
Charmaine shifted. "You're taking two days a week off in the season."
"Yes."
"Wade, some of us can't just take leave."
"You can't. You're not employed, you've got Katie's schedule, that's real.
Russ is nineteen hundred miles away, that's real too.
" I capped the marker. "I could. That's the difference, and it isn't that I'm better — it's that I could, this whole time, and everybody in this room including me let it go on sounding like I couldn't. I've got two hundred and forty hours banked.
Had them for years. Dev's covering the scale on Thursdays and it's on the payroll as of the first, so if anybody wants to argue it's impossible, there's a check with a date on it. "
Nobody argued.
"Charmaine. Alternate weekends. Not checks — weekends. Saturday ten to five, every other, starting the twenty-sixth."
My sister's mouth opened.
"You do the lawn service, and you've done it six years, and nobody's ever thanked you for it out loud, so — thank you.
That's real money, every month, without being asked.
" I looked at her. "It's also six hours a year of your body.
I've been doing the same trick with lumber.
I'm not throwing a rock at you, I'm telling you I threw one at myself, and it's the same rock. "
Charmaine put her hand over her mouth.
"Alternate weekends. Yes or no, in the room, out loud, because that's the only kind that counts anymore."
"Yes."
"Russ. Money's money. Taxes, the water heater, a third of the aide. That's a lot, and living out of state isn't a crime, and I'm not going to stand here and pretend a check isn't a contribution."
"I can come for two weeks in October," Russ said. "I'll take the two weeks."
"Then we'll put it on the October board."
I wrote the hair line last, because I wanted it in the same handwriting as everything else. "Tuesdays. The hair. That's mine. At the sink."
Mom made a noise from the recliner. Not a word, just a noise.
Then I capped the marker, got the ticket back out, and read the last part off it.
I'd tried to learn it in the truck and couldn't hold it, and from memory I'd have softened it somewhere in the middle, because that's what my mouth does.
So I read it — fifty-six years old, holding a delivery ticket out at arm's length because my eyes have gone, reading out loud to my own family like a kid at a school assembly.
"Last thing. Gwen's off the schedule. All of it."
The room went a particular kind of still.
"Not less. Not lighter. Off. Her name doesn't go on this board or any board. If she comes to see Mom she's coming as family — never as staff, not for an hour, not to cover a gap, not 'while she's already over there.' Anybody who wants a shift covered calls me."
"Wade — " Charmaine started.
"And 'Gwen's got it' is done." I said it to the room, but I said it to my sister, because she's the one who says it most and I'm the one who taught her it was available.
"That sentence is out of this family. If it comes out of anybody's mouth I'll correct it every single time, and it'll be awkward every single time, and I'd rather have that than the other thing. "
Russ said, quietly, from the sideboard, "It came out of your mouth."
"It started in my mouth. That's exactly right, and I want that on the board too. Second Tuesday in May. I typed it."
Then I looked at my mother. "Nobody in this family volunteers anybody they didn't make vows to or give birth to. Ever again. That includes you, Mom. It includes me — I'm not allowed to volunteer her either, and that's the whole reason we're standing in this room."
She'd been quiet twelve minutes, which for her is a geological event. She smoothed the blanket over her knee.
"In my day," she said, "a wife would have — "
"In your day, Mom, you ran the rummage sale for thirty-one years."
"I did."
"You had a hundred and forty volunteers and a truck and a bank deposit every May. And Dad never once stacked a folding chair."
Her chin came up.
"I asked you about that Thursday. In the kitchen, when we were doing the peaches. I said, did Dad ever help with the sale, and you laughed at me. You laughed about ten seconds."
"I remember."
"You said, 'Your father wouldn't have known which end of a folding chair to hold.'"
"He wouldn't have."
"And you thought that was funny, because you were forty-five and strong and it was funny then. I want you to hear me say I'm not laughing about it anymore. Because I turned into him, and I did it to my wife, and mine went on for twenty-nine years."
She looked at me a long moment. Then she looked at the board.
"That woman Benita uses too much soap," she said.
Which is my mother saying all right.
The meeting broke up around five. Charmaine cried in the driveway and said she'd put it in her phone right now, the alternate weekends, look, she was doing it.
Russ hung up and then called me back on my cell twenty minutes later just to say, "That was a good thing you did," and I said, "It's a late thing I did," and he said, "Yeah, well," which is what my brother has instead of feelings.
I didn't tell Gwen any of it. She heard anyway — Marta called her that night because Charmaine had called Marta, so it got home by dinnertime the way everything in that family gets home.
"I hear you did a whiteboard," she said, over the dishes.
"I did."
"Okay." And she dried a pan.
That was all, and I understood — I'm slow, but I do get there — that this wasn't going to work like it works in movies, where a man does a thing and gets his wife back by the end of the scene.
She'd been handed sixty-five boxes at a meeting she wasn't at.
A meeting she also wasn't at was not going to be the thing that fixed it.
Then I forgot my keys. Hooked them on the peg by the door out of pure childhood habit, and got all the way to the truck before I felt my pocket.
I came back up the ramp quiet, because I've built enough of that ramp to know where it doesn't creak.
Through the storm door I could see straight down the hall into the living room.
Everybody was gone. My mother was on her feet, which she wasn't supposed to be on her own, hanging on the walker in front of the whiteboard I'd left propped on the chair.
She was reading it. Glasses up on her nose, going down it slow, column by column, the way she used to read the sale ledger.
Benita. Tuesday. Thursday. The hair. Charmaine's weekends.
Russ's money. All of it in her son's ugly block printing — an entire structure for taking care of her that she had not built, had not commanded, had not asked one single person for.
She stood there a long time. Then she reached up with the hand that wasn't on the walker and touched the board, just the flat of two fingers, on the column, on the marker, the way you'd check if paint was dry.
I stepped back off the ramp, went and sat in my truck, and gave it eight minutes before I came back for the keys.
The second time I made noise on the ramp.
She was in the recliner with the television going, and she said, "You forgot your keys, you'd forget your head," and I said, "I would," and drove home.