The Air Mattress in Our Basement
It took me four trips.
The first trip was my mother. I got her up off that mattress with both my arms under hers, and it was like lifting a coat with nobody in it. We went up one step at a time, me behind her with my hands on her waist. On the seventh step she stopped and said, “Just a second, honey,” and stood there breathing through her scarf, and I looked past her shoulder at the lit rectangle of the kitchen door and my husband’s shadow moving across it.
He did not come to the top of the stairs.
I did not take her to the guest room, because there was no bed in it, and because it was his office. I had just agreed to that.
I took her down the hall to the bedroom at the end. Mine and Rick’s. I pulled back the covers on his side, the side nearest the bathroom, the side with the heat register under the window, and I sat her down on it.
“Angie, no.”
“Mom.”
“This is your husband’s bed.”
“It’s my bed too. I get to say who’s in half of it.”
She was too tired to fight me, and that scared me more than the thermometer had. I got her coat off and her shoes off and put her under the electric blanket and turned it to five. She shook for a good ten minutes before her shoulders came down.
Second trip was her bag and her pills and the quilt.
Third trip was my yellow mixing bowl, which I washed and dried and put back in the cupboard where it belonged.
Fourth trip was the air mattress.
I had not planned that one. But I stood at the bottom of the stairs looking at it, soft and green on the concrete with a sheet half pulled off the corner, and I could not stand to leave anything of hers lying down there. So I dragged it up the steps by one corner and left it folded over itself in the hallway outside the bathroom. I would deal with it later.
Then I went into the guest room, where my pillow had been on the cot I had been using to be near her at night, a cot that was now folded up behind Rick’s desk. I took my pillow. I walked it down the hall. I put it on my own side of my own bed, next to my mother.
Rick was in the bedroom doorway when I turned around.
“What is this?”
“This is where Mom’s sleeping.”
“In our bed.”
“In my half of our house.” I kept my voice low because she had finally closed her eyes. “You said you needed your office. You’ve got it. I didn’t touch a thing in there.”
“So where am I supposed to sleep?”
I had not thought about it. That is the honest answer. I had not given one minute to where Rick was going to sleep, and I think he saw that on my face, and I think it landed harder than anything I could have planned.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s your house. I figured you’d know.”
He opened his mouth. He looked at my mother, at her gray face on his pillow. He shut it again.
“This is ridiculous,” he said to the hallway, and he went back to the kitchen.
Josh came in at ten to six with his wrestling bag over his shoulder and snow melting in his hair.