The two columns
He showed it to me in August, at the kitchen table in the duplex, with Mom dozing in her chair and Dad out in the yard pulling at the same four weeds he pulled every day just to have something in his hands.
Two columns. In the first, a small care home in Estherville for Dad, at about four thousand nine hundred a month.
In the second, a different home, a bit smaller, thirty miles from his, for Mom, at five thousand three hundred. Together, ten thousand two hundred.
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Under that, a single line. The center in Spencer with a room for two, which I had mentioned once, in passing, because a woman at church had a husband there. Eleven thousand one hundred. Mark had drawn a line through it and written “surely filled by now.”
“You see it,” Mark said.
“It’s the same care, and it costs nine hundred more. They have a hundred and sixty-eight thousand left. At ten-two a month, that’s about sixteen months. At eleven-one, it’s fifteen. A month less, Patrice. For a room.” “For a room together.”
“For a room. Which they will not notice in a year, because Mom won’t know the difference and Dad will adjust.”
I looked at the window. Dad was out in the yard, bent over, with one hand on the fence. I said what I thought. “Dad won’t adjust.” “People do.” “Not men like Dad.”
Mark closed the pad. “I’m not the enemy here,” he said, and his voice cracked in the middle of it, which surprised us both.
“I’m the one who has to make this last. If the money runs out, Medicaid steps in, and Medicaid does not give you a choice of rooms. You take the bed they have, wherever they have it. I’m trying to buy them time before that happens. Do you understand me?”
“I’m trying to keep them from ending up in a place with a curtain between two strangers.”
I understood him. That was the trouble. Every word he said was true, and every word of it was fear.
I told him I wanted to look into other options. He said fine, but that the Estherville bed would not hold, and he signed the paper on a Thursday while I was at work.