The Weekend My Brother Kept Daddy

“He’s on the floor,” he said. “By the bed. He got up to go to the bathroom and his legs went out. He’s not hurt, I don’t think. He’s talking. I can’t get him up, Shel. I tried.”

I was already pulling on my jeans. Mitch was awake beside me, reaching for the keys on the hook by the door, not saying a word, just moving. I put Kirk on speaker so both hands were free.

“Is he bleeding anywhere?” I said. “Did he hit his head?”

“No. No blood. He says his hip is fine. He’s mad, mostly. He keeps telling me to get the tractor.”

“Can he move both legs?” I said. “Ask him to wiggle his toes on both feet.”

A pause. Then Daddy’s voice in the background, perfectly clear and very annoyed: “I’m wiggling them, Kirk, for crying out loud.”

“Okay,” I said. I made myself slow down. “Don’t pull on his arms, that’s how you dislocate a shoulder. Get a kitchen chair and set it next to him, seat facing him. Help him roll onto his side, then onto his hands and knees. Let him put his hands on the chair seat.”

I heard the scrape of a chair across the old linoleum. I heard Kirk saying, “Okay, Dad, onto your side, there you go.”

I heard Daddy grunting. Mitch stood at the camper door with the keys in his hand, ready.

“Now get behind him,” I said. “Hands on his hips, not his arms. Have him bring one foot up, like he’s proposing. Then on three, he pushes on the chair and you help lift at the hips. Slow.”

“One,” Kirk said. “Two. Three.”

There was a long, heavy sound, a creak of bedsprings, and then, of all things, Daddy laughing. Not a confused laugh.

His real one, the one I hadn’t heard in months, the big belly laugh he used to do when a cow kicked over a bucket.

“Got him,” Kirk said, out of breath. “He’s sitting on the bed. He’s fine. He says I’m weaker than Ray.”

“You want me to come?” I asked. “We can be there in twenty-five minutes.”

There was a pause on the line, and in that pause I heard my brother decide something.

“No,” Kirk said. “I’ve got him. He’s a little wet. I’ll clean him up and change the sheets. I know where the sheets are. They’re on the list. Go back to sleep, Shel.”

I sat on the edge of the camper bed with my jeans half on and the phone in my hand, and I didn’t go back to sleep, not for a long time.

But I didn’t go home either. Mitch hung the keys back up on the hook, lay down beside me, and put his arm around me.

“He did good,” Mitch said into the dark.

“He did,” I said.

Sunday morning I called at seven, and Kirk answered on the first ring again. Before I could say anything, he said, “Second bath’s done. Don’t ask.”

“After the fall?”

“After the fall,” he said. “I figured he shouldn’t go all day like that. He fought me the whole time. I got the shower chair set up wrong and had to start over. But he’s clean, he’s dry between his toes, and he ate two eggs.”

“Thank you, Kirk,” I said. I meant it, and I think he heard that I meant it, because he didn’t say anything back for a second.

“Dawn called,” he said finally. “She asked how it was going. I told her I hadn’t sat down since Friday.”