The Air Mattress in Our Basement

I could have said, Dale, let me get him. I had the time to say it.

I poured my mother’s water into her thermos instead.

Dale opened the basement door and went down, and I heard him get about four steps from the bottom and stop.

It was quiet for a second.

“Rick,” Dale said. “You camping?”

I could not hear what Rick said. It was low and fast.

The kitchen door opened again and Gary came in, stamping, wanting to know what the holdup was. He saw the basement door standing open and Dale’s flashlight moving on the wall, and he went and looked down the stairs too.

So that is how it was. Two men from my husband’s church, one on the fourth step and one at the top, looking down at a green air mattress on a concrete floor with a brown blanket folded square at the foot of it, a red alarm clock on an upturned bucket, and my husband standing beside it in his sweatpants with his work boots in his hand.

“What’s all this?” Gary said.

Rick came to the bottom of the stairs. “It’s nothing. It’s temporary. We had to shuffle some things around.”

“Shuffle,” Dale said.

“Joyce is in the big bedroom. I gave her the big bedroom. She’s more comfortable in there.”

Which was true, in the way that the worst things people say are sometimes true.

And my mother, God love her, tried to help him. She called out from her chair by the door, in her thin chemo voice, “Rick’s been real good about it, Dale. He’s letting me have the good bed.”

I saw Dale’s face when she said that. He had known my mother for six Thursdays. He knew what her being nice sounded like.

Josh put his spoon down.

“Grandma was down there first,” he said.

“Josh,” Rick said from the bottom of the stairs.

“Tuesday. Dad took her bed apart and put it in the garage so he could have his office back, and he put her on that. Right there, where it is now. She was on it in her coat when Mom got home.” His voice was steady, and he was looking at Dale, not at his father. “He said he’s the man of the house, and it’s a perfectly good bed, and he’d sleep on it himself. So I set it up for him.”

Nobody moved.

“Josh, honey,” my mother said. “That’s enough.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Josh said, and picked his spoon back up.

Dale went the rest of the way down. I went to the top of the stairs.

He did not say anything to Rick at first. He crouched down, with his bad knees, and put his bare hand flat on the floor next to the mattress. He held it there. Then he shone his flashlight on the thermometer by the furnace and read it out loud.

“Fifty-three.”

“It’s warmer by the furnace,” Rick said.

“She can’t hold a cold fork, Rick. She told us that the second week. Gary keeps her water inside his coat.”

“It was one afternoon.”

“How many steps is that?”

Rick did not answer.

“Thirteen,” Dale said. “I counted coming down. Old habit.” He stood up, slowly, one hand on his knee. “My dad died in our back bedroom. Took him five months. Marlene and I slept on a pullout the whole time. I’m not telling you that so you’ll think well of me. I’m telling you because it was the best use that house ever got.”