The Weekend My Brother Kept Daddy

“I went to see Paul,” he said. “You know that.”

“I know.”

“I was wrong to do it,” he said. “I want to say that first, before anything else. I’m not saying it because of the weekend. Well, I am. But I’d have been wrong even if you never left.”

I didn’t say anything. I let him go on, the way Paul had let me go on, the way you do when somebody is working up to something hard.

“Dawn said something,” Kirk said. “She said you were living off Dad. And I let it sit there. I let it grow. Because it was easier, Shel. If you were doing it for the money, then I didn’t have to feel what I was feeling. Which was that I’d left you with all of it.”

He rubbed his face with both hands. “Every time I didn’t come out here, I told myself you had it handled. Then I’d feel rotten about it. And then Dawn said that, and I thought, well, maybe she’s getting something out of it. Maybe we’re even. It was a lousy thing to think. It was easier than the truth.”

“Kirk,” I said.

“Let me finish,” he said, and his voice broke a little on it.

“Six hundred dollars. I did the math last night at about three, sitting on the floor next to his bed after I got him up. It’s less than a dollar an hour, Shel. I sell insurance. I know what home care costs. An agency would charge him that in two days.”

He folded the paper again carefully along the soft creases, and he held it in both hands on his knee.

“I called Paul this morning,” he said. “On his cell, at home. I woke him up. I told him to forget I ever asked. I told him it was Dad’s money and Dad’s choice, and Dad made a good one. Paul said he’d been waiting for that call, and then he said something about a boat, and I hung up on him.”

I laughed again, and this time it came out wet, because I had started crying without meaning to.

Kirk handed me the box of tissues from the end table. He knew right where they were. They were on the list.

“I want every other Saturday,” he said. “Starting this one. I’ll come out at eight and stay till you get back, whenever that is.”

“You go to the library, go to the grocery store, go sit in a field, I don’t care. And I’ll take a weekend a month, the whole thing, Friday to Sunday. If Dawn doesn’t like it, she can come out and help me with the eye drops.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I said.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “He’s my dad too.”

We sat there for a while without talking. Out in the yard I heard the truck door open and close, and Mitch’s boots on the porch steps, and then he stopped outside the screen door, the way Mitch does, giving us room.

Then, from down the hall, we heard Daddy’s walker. The rubber feet squeaking on the linoleum, slow and careful.

Kirk was up out of the recliner before I could move, back stiff and all, and he got to the bedroom door just as Daddy came through it in his pajamas.

“What’s all this racket?” Daddy said. “Is it milking time?”

“Hanson boy already did it, Dad,” Kirk said, steady as anything, his hand light under Daddy’s elbow.