The Camper in the Side Yard

Kevin

Brian’s brother called me on the sixth day. I knew he would. I was almost glad, because it is easier to be mad at Kevin than at anybody else.

“Amy, I’m just going to say it,” he said. “This is childish.”

“Hi, Kevin,” I said.

“My mother about died on that porch,” he said. “Brian took her in because she’s got nowhere else to go, and you’re out there in a camper making a point in front of the whole town.”

“I’m not making a point at your mother,” I said.

“She feels terrible,” he said. “Do you know she feels terrible? Come back in the house and stop embarrassing everybody.”

I said, “Kevin, your mom is welcome in our house as long as she needs. She gets three meals and her exercises and her rides. If you want to help, she has therapy Thursday at two.”

He was quiet for a second. Then he said he had work, and he hung up.

I will give him this much. He was not all wrong. A camper in the side yard is a statement, and I knew it when I carried my pillow out there.

You cannot sleep in a 1994 Jayco in October in a town of 2,500 people and pretend you are not saying something. I was saying something. I meant to say it.

The Days

What I want people to know, the part that never got passed around the grocery store, is that Phyllis did not go one single day without me.

Every morning I got up at a quarter to six in the camper. I walked across the frosty grass to the house in my slippers and fleece.

I started the coffee. I helped Phyllis out of bed and into the bathroom. I put on her compression stockings, because on a new hip you cannot reach your own feet for weeks.

Then I made breakfast. Oatmeal with brown sugar, or one fried egg and wheat toast. Her therapist wanted her sitting up in a real chair, so I set it at the kitchen table.

After breakfast, before I left for work, we did her exercises together on the bed. Ankle pumps, heel slides, the little squeezes.

“I did these in gym class in 1962,” she told me the first morning. “I did not like them then either.”

At noon I drove home on my lunch to make her a sandwich. You are not supposed to bend past ninety degrees, and she hated that rule more than anything.

On Thursdays I left work early and drove her twenty-two miles to physical therapy in the county seat. I put a garbage bag on the truck seat so she could slide and turn without twisting the new hip.

Supper was at six, all five of us at the table. Afterward I did the dishes, filled her water, set her walker by the bed, and said goodnight.

Then I put on my fleece and walked back out to the camper.

Brian did his part. He helped her in the evenings. But he watched me do the mornings, and the lunches, and walk out that door every night at nine.

He did not say much. Neither did I.