The Notebook That Spoke For Her

Craig came twice in six years. Once was the Christmas of her third year, two nights, and he spent most of it on his phone handling something at the office that could not wait. Once was a Saturday the following spring, four hours round trip for him, maybe three hours in the house, long enough to tell Mom she looked good, which she did not, and long enough to tell me I was doing a wonderful job, which I was, and then he drove home.

I am not going to pretend I was never angry about that. I was. There were nights I sat in my car in Mom’s driveway before I went in, just breathing, just working up whatever I needed to go be patient with a woman who sometimes did not know I was her daughter, and I thought about Craig in his subdivision with his quiet nights and his unbroken sleep, and the anger sat in my chest like a stone I couldn’t put down.

But I never called him to fight about it. People have asked me since why I didn’t just pick up the phone years ago and tell him plainly what I needed from him. The honest answer is that I tried, twice, in the second year, and both times he said the same thing, that I had it handled better than he ever could, that Mom was lucky to have me, and he said it kindly enough that calling him lazy or absent after that felt like I would be the one starting the fight. I did not want to be the sister who called and demanded. I wanted to be the sister he noticed on his own. He never did. So I stopped calling to ask, and I kept driving out twice a day instead, because the choice in front of me every evening was never Craig, it was Mom, alone in that house or not alone, and there was only one answer to that.

Dave never once complained. My husband drives truck parts and does small engine repair out of our garage, and some nights after a ten hour day he would just get in his own truck and drive out to Mom’s so I could sit through one of Allie’s basketball games without my phone in my hand the whole time. He never told me to slow down, and he never told me to stop, because he knew there was no stopping, not with dementia, not until there was.