The Air Mattress in Our Basement
He made up the guest bed himself, and then he stood in the kitchen and said to my mother, with his cap in his hands, “Your room’s ready whenever you want it, Joyce. It’s yours as long as you need it. I should never have touched it.”
“Thank you, Rick,” she said, and went back to her crossword.
She moved back in that night. I went back to my own bed, alone, and lay on my own side.
Rick stayed in the basement.
I asked my mother about it, in the car. I said, “Mom, he’s sorry. I think he’s really sorry.”
“I think so too.”
“He’s still sleeping on the floor.”
“I know where he’s sleeping.” She looked out at the snowbanks along Highway 12. “Angie, I forgave him that night in the bathroom. That’s between me and the Lord and it’s done. But forgiving a man and telling him it’s over are two different jobs. If you had gone and fetched him up the first week, he’d have learned that he was right to wait you out. He needs to find out what kind of man he is when nobody’s coming to get him.”
“How long does that take?”
“I’ll know,” she said.
So February went, and March came in wet.
Rick called Dale himself and said he would take the Thursdays. He used his own vacation days to do it. He sat in the vinyl chair beside hers for four hours at a stretch, and learned the nurses’ names, and carried her water inside his coat the way Gary had.
He went back to men’s breakfast, and I heard from Brenda that he had stood up again. Not to shake hands this time. He told them what he had done, plain, the bed and the bowl and all of it, and then he sat down. Dale had slid the syrup over to him, and that was all anybody said.
With Josh it took longer. Boys that age do not hand it back easy.
It was a Sunday night in March, the two of them in the garage sharpening the mower blade, and I was in the laundry room with the door open. I was not trying to listen. I listened.
“You were right to do it,” Rick said. “The mattress. I’ve wanted to say that.”
“I know I was.”
“I was so mad at you I couldn’t see. For about a day. Then I was just ashamed. I’m still ashamed.”
The file went back and forth.
“I don’t want you to grow up thinking that’s what it means,” Rick said. “What I said. Man of the house. My dad said it every time he wanted something and didn’t have a good reason. I said it for the same thing.”
“So what’s it mean?”
A long quiet.
“I think it means you’re the one who gets up,” Rick said. “When somebody’s sick in the night. I think that’s about all it means.”
“Grandma said you get up every time now.”
“I can hear her through the floor.”
“Yeah,” Josh said. “That’s kind of why I put it there.”
I had to put my hand over my mouth. Sixteen years old.
Her last treatment was the final Thursday in March.
They have a brass bell on the wall at the cancer center, and when you finish, you ring it. I took the day without pay. Josh skipped school with my blessing. Dale and Gary drove in behind us in the crew cab.
My mother rang that bell three times, with Rick holding her elbow because her feet were still not her own. Everybody in the infusion room clapped, even the ones with needles in their arms.