The Trip My Son Would Not Cancel

I did what I could. But I am an old man and my hands are not steady and there are things a husband cannot do for a wife without breaking both their hearts a little, and Colleen did those things, and she did them for two years, and she never once let her mother feel like a burden. She would come in tired to the bone off a twelve-hour shift and she would put on the radio, the old country station Marion loved, and she would dance her mother slow around the kitchen if her mother had the wind for it, and Marion would laugh, and for a minute you would forget.

I called Grant after every fall. Every hospital stay. I would get his voicemail, mostly, and he would call back a day or two later, on a headset, in traffic, and he would ask the right questions in the wrong voice and offer to send money. He sent money, I will give him that. He sent a check for a stair lift we did not need because our house is one floor, and he seemed to think that settled something. He never came. Two years of it, and he came home exactly once, last Thanksgiving, for about twenty-six hours, and he spent most of them on his laptop in the front room while his sister cooked and his mother, who could not follow much by then, kept reaching over to pat his arm and say his name like it was a wonderful thing she had remembered.

I watched him let her pat his arm and check his phone over her head, and something in me went quiet and cold that day and it has never fully warmed back up.

He does not know I saw that. He thinks I did not notice. That is the thing about a man like my son. He believes that if he keeps his voice reasonable and sends the check, no one is keeping any account. He never once considered that his father was keeping an account. That his father had, in fact, already kept it, years before, and closed the book, and told no one.

I will get to that.