The Double Room for Mom and Dad

Why I did not fight

Neal asked me that night whether I wanted to take it to someone.

We were sitting on the back step, with a cold supper going colder, and he said it gently, because he has known me for thirty-one years and knows what happens when I am cornered.

“There’s a lawyer in town,” he said. “Doug Haverkamp does elder work. He could look at the power of attorney. Maybe there’s a way.”

I thought about it. I want to be honest: I thought about it for most of that night.

A part of me, the part that works in a hospital and has watched a hundred families fall apart over exactly this kind of thing, wanted Mark’s name taken off every paper he had signed.

But I could see the whole road laid out. A hearing. Mark in one chair and me in the other. Our father listening to his two children argue about his money while his wife asked what day it was.

Months of it, with Dad refusing his meals the whole time, and at the end of it a judge who, even if he ruled for me, would have made my brother into a man I could never sit across a table from again.

Mom and Dad had one thing left to spend, and it was time. I would not spend it on a war. “No,” I told Neal.

“I’m going to find them a room.” “Mark said that room in Spencer was probably gone by now.” “Mark said it costs nine hundred more. That’s not the same as gone.”

Neal looked at me for a while, with his big hands hanging between his knees. “Then I guess we find out,” he said.

Fourteen homes

For ten days I made calls on my lunch breaks, sitting in my Buick in the hospital parking lot with a sandwich I did not eat and a spiral notebook on the dashboard.

I called every care center within sixty miles. I started nearest the hospital and worked outward, and I left Spencer for the end, because Mark had said it was gone and I believed him. Spencer, Estherville, Sheldon, Storm Lake, Cherokee, Sibley, Emmetsburg. I called a place in Milford with a little pond and a woman at the desk who laughed, not unkindly, when I said “double room.”

Meanwhile Cassie coaxed broth and chocolate shakes into Dad a spoonful at a time, enough that the doctor said he did not need the hospital.

Fourteen homes. Fourteen ways of saying no. I wrote each one down in my notebook, with the name of the person I had talked to and the date, because it gave me something to do with my hands.

On the fifteenth call, I got a woman named Georgia Moll, who ran admissions at the center on the north side of Spencer, the one Mark had put at the bottom of his legal pad.

“We have one double,” she said. “A corner room. It’s been empty since June because the price puts people off. Nobody from your family ever called about it, honey, or I’d have told you the same. Window on the east side. It gets the morning sun.”

I did not say anything for a second. “Hello?” “I’m here,” I said. “I’m sorry. Tell me that again.”

She told me again. Corner room, east window, enough space for two beds and a recliner, a private bath, a door onto the courtyard. Staff on the floor twenty-four hours. She said the number, and it was the one I already knew.

I sat very still in the Buick with my sandwich in my lap. Then I did a different sum than Mark’s.