Chapter 16
Feel free to disagree with me, but I think that most people find comfort in having big decisions taken out of their hands, even if they wouldn’t admit to it.
Take my mother, for example. The woman who could never decide on anything.
Not where she wanted to live, not whether to leave my father, not could-she-or-couldn’t-she face sending her sweet baby off to boarding school.
(She could, it turned out.) This indecision was written into her very person—the hand-wringing, the shallow breathing, the inability to get herself dressed for a night on the town.
Even the small things like whether or not she felt up to eating dinner with us—whether she could bear the company of her own family on any given day—were best left for someone else to decide.
And it can be awfully hard work being that someone else.
It’s a thankless job being responsible for someone so listless and ephemeral, and so I really sympathized with my father the time I caught him standing over Mother’s dressing table with his hands on her neck, telling her to start acting like a living, breathing human being or, by God, he would make sure she wasn’t one.
Maybe he was a little rough about it, maybe his methods were a little heavy-handed (get it?
!), but he got her attention. Sometimes people need that kind of intervention, is all I’m saying. It keeps life moving forward.
I’ve solved the mystery of the Evanses’ lawn ornaments, by the way.
Mack and Hailey haven’t been around this week, and in their absence three goats have appeared at their house: one new one, made out of cheap plastic, on the lawn by the side gate, and two old ones, inside taking care of the grandkids.