The Weekend My Brother Kept Daddy

Paul Becker called me on a Tuesday in early August, while Daddy was asleep in his recliner with the Brewers game turned down low and a dish towel still over his shoulder from helping me dry.

“Shelby, I want you to hear this from me before you hear it some other way,” Paul said.

He had been our family’s lawyer since before I could drive, and he sounded tired, like a man who would rather be fishing.

I took the phone out onto the porch so Daddy wouldn’t wake.

Past the empty dairy barn, the corn the neighbors rent from us stood taller than a man and didn’t move at all in the heat.

“Kirk came by the office yesterday,” Paul said. “He wanted to know why you’ve been getting six hundred dollars a month out of your dad’s checking account. He said the word arrangement like it tasted bad.”

I sat down on the top step. I didn’t say anything for a while, and Paul let me not say it.

He had always been good at waiting. It was one of the reasons Daddy trusted him.

“I told him the truth,” Paul went on. “Your dad came in last summer and asked me to write it up. He signed it in front of me and my secretary, and I had Dr. Olson’s letter saying he was able to sign. It’s a caregiver agreement. They’re common and they’re legal.”

“I know,” I said. “I was sitting out in your hallway that day, reading a magazine about boats.”

“I also told him that paper protects everybody if your dad ever needs the nursing home and the county looks back through his accounts,” Paul said. “I don’t think he heard much after the number six hundred.”

I thanked him. He asked if I wanted him to call Kirk again, and I said no. He said, “Shelby, for what it’s worth, I’d have charged a lot more than that.”

Then he hung up, and I sat on the step until the yard light buzzed on above me.

Six hundred dollars a month. I had done the math once, on the back of a pharmacy receipt, at three in the morning.

If you counted the nights, and you had to count the nights, it came to less than a dollar an hour.

Fourteen months earlier, Dr. Olson had sat Daddy and me down in a little room at the clinic in town and said the words early dementia.

Daddy had listened like he was hearing a milk price he didn’t like. Then he’d asked if he could still drive to the feed mill. The answer was no.

I was forty-six that summer, a part-time librarian at the elementary school, with a husband who could cook and a daughter grown and gone to Eau Claire.

I told Mitch I’d go out to the farm for a few weeks to get Daddy settled. A few weeks turned into fourteen months.

Mitch and I lived four miles down County Road D in a ranch house with a big garden.

Most nights that year I slept in my old bedroom under the farmhouse eaves, with the door open and one ear on the hallway. Mitch came out for supper and stayed when he could.

Daddy had milked sixty Holsteins on that place for forty-one years. He sold the herd in 2009 when his knees quit, and the barn had been quiet ever since.

But some nights, around three, he would get up with his walker and head for the back door in his undershirt, because the cows needed milking.