The Waltz Dad Wrote for Mama

The Money

It took me two days to cool down enough to think straight. On Thursday, I drove to Darla’s on my afternoon off.

She opened the door in her house robe at three in the afternoon, and the kitchen table behind her was covered in papers.

“I’m not here to fight,” I said. “I want to understand.”

She looked at me a long time. Then she stepped back and let me in. She poured me a cup of coffee I didn’t want and sat across from me with her hands folded on the stack of bills.

“Memory care is six thousand five hundred dollars a month,” she said. “Every month. Medicare doesn’t pay a dime of it. People think it does. It doesn’t. His county pension pays a little. Social Security pays a little. The rest is coming out of the savings.”

“How much savings?”

“Not enough,” she said. “Not near enough. When it runs out, he goes on Medicaid, and the place he’s in only has two Medicaid beds and a waiting list. If they don’t have a bed, they move him to a home forty miles off. I’d have to drive eighty miles round trip to see him.”

“I sold his truck in September,” she went on. “I sold the riding mower, and the chainsaw, and the guns his daddy left him. The fiddle was just one more thing. I told myself he didn’t know it anymore. I told myself it was a piece of wood.”

“It wasn’t a piece of wood to me,” I said.

“I know that.” She looked down at her hands. “I knew it when I carried it in there. That’s why I never told you. I was ashamed, and I was tired, and I didn’t want to see your face.”

I want to be honest here. I was sorry for her, sitting there in her robe with her bills. But I was angrier than I was sorry.

She had made a choice about my father’s whole life without one word to me, and she had made it for four hundred dollars.

“I’m going to buy it back,” I told her.

She lifted her chin. “That’s your business.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “It is now.” And I left my coffee on the table and went home.