The Little House Next Door

What Curt carried

I want to be fair to my husband, because he is not a bad man, and anybody who tells this story like he is a bad man has not met him.

Curt’s father had Alzheimer’s for six years. It started when Curt was nineteen and home from his first year at the tech college in Alexandria.

Elmer forgot how to start the tractor. Then he forgot which cows were his. Then he forgot Curt.

Curt quit school and came home to run the farm. He did the chores before light and after dark. He lifted his father out of the bathtub and into bed and back into the bathtub.

He learned to shave a man who was trying to hit him. He was twenty-two.

By the end Elmer was in the county home, the old building before they built the new one, and Curt drove there every night after milking and sat with a man who called him Sir.

When Elmer died, Curt sold the cows within the month and never milked again.

He went to work selling seed corn and soybeans for a seed company out of Morris. He was good at it.

Farmers trusted him because he had been one. He knew a good stand of corn from the road and could talk about plant populations for an hour.

But he never talked about his father. Not once in twenty-nine years, except one night early in our marriage when he had too many beers at a wedding and told me in the truck, “I can’t do that twice, Robin. If it happens to Mom, I can’t do that twice. I’ll put her somewhere good and I’ll visit, but I can’t watch it.”

I believed him then. I believed him that August too. I knew the brochure on my table was not greed.

It was a man trying to get out of a burning building before the roof came down.

And the lake lot was not greed either, not really. He had wanted a lake place since he was twenty-five. Every summer we drove past those cabins on Minnewaska and Lake Reno and he would point at one and say, “Someday.”

Thirty years of someday. He was fifty-five and his knees hurt and he could feel someday running out.

I understood all of it. I still could not do what he asked. The money was not his to want and it was not mine to give away. It was Helen’s.

Mrs. Lindgren’s house

The little house next door belonged to Arlene Lindgren, who was eighty-eight and had lived in it since her husband built it in 1961.

It was a one-bedroom house, small and white, with a single concrete step up to the front door and a crab apple tree in the yard.

Two days after the brochure, Arlene was out watering her peonies and I walked over with a loaf of zucchini bread.

She told me she was moving to her daughter’s in Fargo before the snow. She said her daughter had a mother-in-law apartment over the garage with an elevator chair.

“I hate to sell to a stranger,” she said. “I’d like somebody who’ll keep the peonies.”

I stood in her yard holding my bread and looked at that little house and something in my chest went very quiet and very sure, the way it does at the clinic when a patient’s color changes and I know before the nurse does.

One floor. One bedroom. One step. Fifty feet from my kitchen window.

I did not do anything that day. I went home and called Helen’s doctor at the clinic, Dr. Haugen, who I had worked beside for fourteen years, and I asked him straight out whether Helen could live alone next door with help.

He thought about it. He had seen her the month before. He said early dementia was not the same as late, that she was still dressing herself and feeding herself and knew her people.

He said she would need someone checking on her, the stove made safe, the doors watched at night, and a plan for when it got worse.

“It’ll get worse, Robin,” he said. “You know that.”

“I know that,” I said. “But not yet.”

He said that if I could keep an eye on her nights and get her into the adult day program at the senior center three days a week, he would put it in her chart that living near family with supports was medically appropriate. That was all I needed from him.