The Ramp My Brother Built for Dad

“Dad,” I said. “Are you sure? It’s almost two hours each way. And Terry and I aren’t speaking right now. I don’t know how it would go.”

“I’m old, Stacy,” he said. “I’m not gone. I’d like to see the place.” He patted my hand with his shaking one. “Terry always has his people up for the Fourth. Jolie told me at Christmas. Let’s go on the Fourth.”

I asked him twice more that afternoon if he was sure. Both times he said the same thing. “I’d like to see it.” And the third time I asked, he said, “Don’t make me say it again, honey.”

I want to be clear about this too. I did not take my father to that cabin to make a scene.

He asked me to go. I would have taken him anywhere he asked. I’ve been taking care of people my whole working life.

I called the nurse manager and arranged a day pass for the Fourth.

I packed his medications in a zippered bag with the times written on masking tape: his carbidopa-levodopa at ten, two and six.

Jeff was scheduled at the plant that day and couldn’t trade his shift. “Call me if anything goes sideways,” he said the night before. “I’ll come up after. I don’t care what time.” He hugged me longer than usual.

I wore a white blouse. I don’t know why. I think I wanted to look like I was going to church.

I put my hair up off my neck, what there is of it, because it was going to be hot.

I signed Dad out at the front desk at ten in the morning.

The aide on his wing, a sweet girl named Megan, helped me with the transfer from the wheelchair to my car, and we folded the chair into the trunk.

Dad had put on the better of his two flannel shirts, the red one without the hole. Megan had pressed it for him.

He put his plain navy cap on and looked at himself in the rearview mirror for a second.

“Sharp,” I told him. He smiled with half his mouth. That’s what the Parkinson’s does to a smile. But the half he can still move, he meant all the way.

We drove north through Iowa Falls and up 65. The corn was knee high and then some. Dad hummed most of the way, hymns mostly, and once a Johnny Cash song, very soft.

At two o’clock I pulled into a Casey’s in Mason City and gave him his pill with a bottle of water.

He held it in his good hand and took it slowly. Then he asked for a breakfast pizza slice, and I bought him one.

“Your mother would’ve liked a lake place,” he said, looking out the windshield at the gas pumps. “She always wanted to see Okoboji. We never went. Always something with the house.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said, “I know, Dad.” He ate half the slice and gave me the other half, which is what he has done with every slice of anything since I was four.

The cabin was down a gravel road off the county blacktop, past a row of mailboxes and a bait shop with a hand-painted sign.

I could hear the party before I could see it. Music, kids laughing, somebody’s boat out on the water.

There were trucks parked along both sides of the road.