The Weekend My Brother Kept Daddy

Paper was not what my brother was missing. What he was missing was the work, and you can’t hand somebody the work in an envelope.

When I went back inside, Daddy was awake, picking at the dish towel on his shoulder. “Was that your mother?” he asked.

Mom had been gone eleven years. I told him it was Paul Becker, and he said, “Paul’s a good man. Does he still have that boat?”

I said he did. Then I helped Daddy up, walked him to the bathroom, got him into his pajamas, gave him his eight o’clock pill a little late, put in his eye drops while he grumbled, and tucked the sheet around his feet the way he liked it, tight, like a hospital bed.

Mitch came out the next evening with a pan of brats he’d grilled at home. We ate on the porch while Daddy dozed inside. I told him about Paul’s call.

Mitch is a quiet man. He drives a milk truck for the co-op and he thinks before he talks, which I have always loved about him.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “I’m not going to fight him about it. I’m too tired to fight anybody about anything. And Daddy would hear it, even if he didn’t understand it.”

Mitch nodded and ate a brat. Then he said, “The fair starts Friday. Steve’s got the camper parked behind the dairy barn all week, and Amy’s showing her heifer Saturday. You haven’t been to the fair in two years.”

Amy was his brother Steve’s girl, fifteen, and she had raised a Holstein heifer named Clementine from a calf.

She’d been texting me pictures of that heifer all summer. Clementine in the wash rack. Clementine with her topline clipped. Clementine looking bored in a straw hat.

“I can’t go to the fair,” I said. “Who would stay with Daddy?”

Mitch didn’t say anything. He just looked at me. And after a while, I understood what he meant, and I laughed for the first time in about a week.

“Oh, Mitch,” I said.

“Two nights,” he said. “His son can do two nights. You’ve done four hundred and something. I’ll be with you the whole time, and the fairgrounds are twenty-five minutes away if anything goes sideways.”

I lay awake that night in my old bedroom, listening to Daddy breathe through the baby monitor, and I thought about it from every side.

I thought about whether it was spiteful. I prayed about it, honestly, because I didn’t want to do it if it was only spite.

What I came to was this. Daddy wasn’t only my father. He was Kirk’s father too.

Kirk had a right to know him the way he was now, not the way he was for two hours one Saturday in March. And Kirk had a right to see what six hundred dollars a month actually bought.

I also thought hard about whether Daddy would be safe. Early dementia is hard, but it is not an emergency room every night.

Daddy could feed himself. He knew his own children. He needed someone patient and awake, and Kirk, whatever else he was, had raised two kids through colic.

So on Wednesday I sat down at the kitchen table with a yellow legal pad and wrote out the whole thing. Every pill and what it was for.

Every time. How to do the eye drops so he wouldn’t fight. How to work the shower chair. Where the extra towels were.