Mom’s Lawn Chair on My Sister’s Dock

Mom is Helen Becker, and she is eighty-one, and she is the sharpest person I have ever known.

She worked in the county clerk’s office in Tavares for twenty-six years. She can still tell you which judge retired in what year and why.

Years ago, after Dad’s heart surgery, Mom had papers drawn up. A will, a health care surrogate form, and a durable power of attorney.

She named Denise as her agent, because Denise was the oldest and lived closest, and because Denise had always been the one who handled things.

The papers let Denise sell Mom’s house and pay Mom’s bills. They did not let her give Mom’s money to herself. In Florida, a gift to the agent has to be spelled out in the document, and Mom’s never was.

I did not mind. I was raising my son by myself back then, working the drive-through window and picking up Saturdays. Denise had the time, and she was good at it.

In January, Mom fell in her kitchen reaching for a can of coffee on the top shelf. She broke her hip.

She was on the floor for almost three hours before the neighbor, Mr. Hutchins, noticed her newspaper still in the yard and came over and looked in the window.

She had surgery at the hospital in Leesburg and three weeks of rehab. When the doctor said she could not go home alone, Mom did not argue.

She said she had seen enough of her kitchen floor to last her, and she picked Lakeside Oaks herself, from a list.

Assisted living is not cheap in Florida. Her room cost fifty-two hundred dollars a month.

Mom’s Social Security and Dad’s small pension came to about twenty-six hundred and fifty. The rest had to come from somewhere.

That somewhere was the house. We all agreed on it, sitting around Mom’s bed at the rehab center.

Sell the house on Lee Street, put the money in Mom’s account, and pay the difference every month. At that rate the money would last her more than six years.

“And if I outlast it,” Mom said, “you girls can put me in the spare room and feed me grits.” We laughed. Denise laughed too. I remember that clearly. She squeezed Mom’s hand and said, “Don’t you worry about one thing.”

The house sold in February to a young couple with a baby on the way. It went for two hundred and two thousand dollars after the commission.

Denise handled the closing under the power of attorney, because Mom was still in rehab. That was what the paper was for.

I helped empty the house. Phil and my son Kyle carried out the heavy furniture. I packed the kitchen.

The only thing Mom asked us to bring to Lakeside Oaks, besides her clothes and her Bible and Dad’s picture, was her old folding lawn chair from the back porch.

It is nothing special, that chair. Aluminum frame, faded blue and green webbing, one arm with a bend in it where Dad sat down too hard on it in about 1994.

Mom sat in it every evening for forty years and watched the sun go down over the back fence.

I knew Phil had lost his job. Everybody knew. He had been a shift foreman at a truss plant off Highway 27 for nineteen years, building roof trusses for half the subdivisions going up between Leesburg and The Villages.

The plant closed in November. The owners sold the land, and ninety people were let go two weeks before Thanksgiving.