The Coffee Group That Brought Dad Home

My brother, Regan, an accountant in Omaha, had the legal pad on his knee before the surgeon was out of the room.

He was writing numbers in two columns, and he did not look up when Dad groaned in the bed.

“It’s two hours, Jana,” Regan said, still writing. “It’s not the moon. You can go on your days off, and I’ll come out on Sundays when I can.”

Dad was 84. He had gone out to the machine shed on the ninth of January to check a heat lamp, and he had stepped on the one patch of ice the gravel did not cover.

Tom found him there an hour later, because Dad did not answer the house phone and my husband has a feeling about my father that I have learned to trust. Dad was lying on his side, talking to the barn cats.

The hospital in Columbus pinned the hip the next morning. The surgeon said it went well. Then he said the word nobody in my family had ever said out loud, which was nursing home.

Dad could not go back to the farmhouse. There are fourteen steps from the yard to the kitchen and another sixteen up to his bedroom, and he lived there alone since Mom died in 2019.

So it was Regan with the legal pad, and me by the window, and Dad in the bed with his white hair flat on one side and his eyes not quite landing on either of us.

“There are two options that have a bed open,” Regan said. “The home in town is about $9,000 a month at private pay. The one out past Grand Island is about $7,200.”

“Dad’s pension and his Social Security come to about $3,100 a month,” he said. “So in town, Dad pays $5,900 out of savings every month. Out there, he pays $4,100.”

I knew those numbers already. I had sat at Dad’s kitchen table with the bank statements in December, because I am the one who lives eleven miles away and Regan is the one who lives ninety.

“His savings are a little over two hundred thousand,” Regan said. “At $5,900 a month, it’s gone in three years. Then the farm gets sold to pay the rest. At $4,100, we have breathing room.”

He said we. I noticed it. I did not say anything, because Dad’s eyes had come around to me, and my father has always been able to read my face better than the paper.

“Regan’s good with the numbers,” Dad said, slow and thick from the medicine. “Let Regan handle it, Jana. Your mother set it up that way.”

That was the truth of it. Mom had the papers drawn up in 2018, when she knew the cancer was not going away.

Regan was the power of attorney for both of them, because Regan was the one with the numbers.

I could have fought it. People have said that to me since, at the post office and in the church parking lot.

I could have made a scene right there in that hospital room in Columbus.

But my brother held the power of attorney, and he had the pen in his hand, and our father was lying in a bed between us with a pinned hip and the medicine fog still on him.

I was not going to fight my brother in front of my father. I have never once done it, not when we were kids and not as grown people.