The Wheelchair My Brother Would Not Allow

The hip healed wrong. There were complications, and then there was a second surgery, and somewhere in all of it my mother’s balance never came back, and the doctors were honest with us that at seventy-seven the safe thing, the thing that would keep her from a fall that killed her, was the wheelchair. Mom took that news harder than she took the break itself. My mother had walked into that lumberyard office every working day for thirty years. She had walked me down the aisle after our father passed, both of us, arm in arm, because she said somebody in this family was going to give me away and it might as well be the person who raised me. Sitting down in that chair for good was a kind of grief for her, and I sat with her through it, the long afternoons of it, and Preston sent a check for a stair lift for a house that did not have stairs, because he had not been to Mom’s in so long he did not remember the layout.

That is when we built the apartment. My husband and I took out a loan and added on to our house so Mom could have her own front door and her own kitchen and keep every scrap of independence the chair had not taken. Preston offered to pay for it. I told him no. I do not fully know why I told him no, except that I did not want my mother’s dignity to be one more thing my brother could say he had bought. I wanted her to have a daughter, not a donor. So the labor got divided, like I said. He had the money. I had the mornings, the evenings, the doctor’s appointments, the bad nights, the good ones. I had my mother. And for two years I told myself that was a fair trade and even a lucky one, and most days I believed it.

Let me tell you about my brother, because you cannot understand the rest of this without understanding him. Preston is four years older than me and he has spent his whole life terrified of looking like where he came from. We grew up in Millbrook, a town in Ohio small enough that the whole thing takes four minutes to drive through, and our father drove a propane truck and our mother cleaned rooms at the motel out by the highway and later kept the books for the lumberyard, and there was never quite enough, and Preston felt every dollar of that not-enough like a splinter under the skin.