The Notebook That Spoke For Her
That first year, Craig and I actually talked about it like partners. He said he’d help cover the costs of whatever Medicare didn’t, since he could afford it easier on his salary than I could on mine, and for a while he did send a check now and then, two hundred here, three hundred there, and I was grateful for it, I want to be honest about that. What he never offered, and what I never found a way to ask for without sounding like I was keeping score, was his time. Money was the one thing that was easy for him to give, because it cost him nothing but a signature. Time would have cost him weekends, and weekends were the thing he guarded hardest.
I live in Hartwell, Minnesota, a town of about eleven hundred people close enough to the Iowa line that we grew up listening to Des Moines radio stations on clear nights. My mother’s house, the Kobel place, sits two miles out on a gravel road, the house her and my father built in 1971, white clapboard, a porch that still needs painting, forty acres my dad used to rent out to the neighbor for corn and soybeans. Craig lives three and a half hours north, outside the Cities, in a subdivision with a name like a golf course. He has a good job in insurance. He is not a bad man. I want to say that plainly, because this is not a story about a villain. This is a story about a brother who was far away, and a sister who was not, and what six years of that distance does to two people who used to share a bedroom wall.
For the first year, it was manageable. Mom still knew the names of her grandchildren, still remembered to take her own pills most days, still made her potato salad for the Fourth of July and put too much vinegar in it same as always. I drove out most evenings after work, just to check, just to sit. Craig called on Sundays. I want to be fair. For a while, Sundays were something.
By year two, she was leaving the stove on. By year three, she could not be alone past dark. That was the year I went down to part time at the school, where I’d been the office secretary for eleven years, because there was no other way to be at her house by four every afternoon and still be there again by seven the next morning to get her up, washed, dressed, and medicated before the home health aide came at nine.