Mark told me in the parking lot of the credit union in Spencer, where he had asked me to meet him, on a gray Tuesday in September, with his car keys already in his hand.
He said it the way you would mention a change in the weather. Mom and Dad were going to separate homes on Monday, and the paperwork was signed.
“It’s done, Patrice,” he said. “I wanted you to hear it from me.”
I stood there with my purse strap cutting into my shoulder. I had come to deposit a check.
I had not come to learn that my parents of sixty-one years would sleep thirty miles apart for the rest of their lives. “Separate homes,” I said. “Mark. They’ve never spent a night apart. Not one.”
“They spent a week apart when Mom had her hip done.”
“That was a week. And he sat in the waiting room the whole time, and the nurses brought him coffee because they felt sorry for him.”
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
Mark looked at his keys. He is fifty-five, three years older than I am, a loan officer at a credit union in Engstrom, and he has always been the one who is good with numbers.
He has our father’s square hands and our mother’s habit of rubbing her thumb across her knuckles when she is worried. He was doing it right then.
“It’s nine hundred dollars a month,” he said. “Nine hundred, Patrice. Every month. Do you know how fast that adds up?”
I did know. I am not a fool about money either. But I also knew something he had not stopped to count, and I did not say it in that parking lot, because I could see he was not ready to hear it.
I said, “Who told them?” “I did. Sunday.” “And what did Dad say?”
Mark’s thumb stopped moving. “He didn’t say anything. He just looked at Mom.”
What the numbers said
I should tell you how we got there, because Mark is not a monster, and I will not tell it as though he were.
Our parents, Norm and Elaine Whitcomb, farmed two hundred and forty acres outside Everly for fifty-four years. Corn and beans, and a few hogs until Dad’s knees quit him.
They raised the two of us in a white farmhouse with a porch that sagged on the east end, and in all that time I do not remember either of them going to bed angry or going to bed alone.
Dad is eighty-five now. His heart has been wearing out since he was seventy-nine.
Mom is eighty-three, and her memory started slipping about three years ago, a word here, a name there, and then one morning she put the coffee pot in the refrigerator and cried about it until noon.
They sold the home place in 2024, after Dad had his second stent and the doctor used the word “stairs” in a sentence they did not like.
The sale and what they had put by came to a little over three hundred thousand dollars. It sounds like a great deal until you learn what care costs.
Mark was the one who sat with them at the lawyer’s office in Spencer and signed on as their power of attorney. I was there, too.
I remember Dad patting the arm of the chair and saying, “Mark’s good with money. Let him have it. Patrice has enough on her plate.”
Nobody argued. It made sense. I had my job and Neal and my own aching back, and Mark lived forty minutes away but had a head for figures.
For two years it worked fine. They lived in a little rented duplex in Spencer, close enough that I could stop in on my way home from the hospital, and I did, most days.
Then in July Mom fell in the bathroom and could not get up, and Dad could not lift her, and he sat on the cold tile with her for four hours before the neighbor heard him calling.
After that, nobody could pretend. Both of them needed more help than I could give between shifts. Mom needed someone with her at night.
Dad needed his pills laid out and his meals watched. They needed a care center. And that is where Mark’s legal pad came out.