The Camper in the Side Yard

His Side

Before I tell you what I did, I owe Brian his side. I am going to give it to him whole, because he deserves that, and because it is a strong side.

His mother, Phyllis, was seventy-six and had been a widow for nine years. She lived alone eleven miles out of town in the farmhouse where Brian grew up.

Every bedroom in that farmhouse is up a staircase so steep you climb it with both hands on the rail.

The Wednesday before, Phyllis had gone out to bring her geraniums in ahead of the frost. She slipped on the wet top step of the porch and broke her hip.

She lay on those cold boards for almost two hours before the mail carrier saw her from the road and called it in.

The hospital replaced the hip the next morning. She was up with a walker the day after, but she was slow, and it was Tuesday before they were ready to send her out.

That morning a young woman named Sarah, the hospital social worker, came in with a clipboard and very kind eyes. She told Brian his mother could not go home to that farmhouse alone.

Not with those stairs. Not for six weeks at least, maybe eight, with a walker and a list of rules about how far she could bend and how she could sit.

Sarah offered a rehab place, a nursing facility in the next town with a good therapy program. Phyllis had been in the hospital almost a week, so Medicare would have covered most of it.

Phyllis said no. She said it flat and she said it twice. She had watched her own sister go into one of those places and never come back out.

A patient can refuse that, and Phyllis was sharp as a tack. So Sarah said the hospital needed a safe discharge plan before they could let her go, with an address and a name of who would be with her.

She said she had another family waiting, and she would be back in twenty minutes.

Brian stood in that hallway with his mother crying in the bed behind him and a clock running. And he did what a good son does. He said, she’s coming home with us.

He said we had a bedroom on the ground floor, and his wife was home by four every day. Then he walked out to the parking lot and texted me, because he could not stand to hear me go quiet on the phone.

That is his side. I have turned it over a hundred times since, and I still cannot find the place where it is wrong. His mother needed a bed with no stairs, and the only one we had was ours.

The one thing missing from it was me.