The Double Room for Mom and Dad

The overtime

I am a unit clerk. I make twenty-one dollars an hour, and on extra shifts at the hospital they pay time and a half.

A twelve-hour shift at that rate comes to about three hundred and seventy dollars before taxes, and about three hundred after. Three extra shifts a month would come to nine hundred.

I told Neal at supper. I laid out the numbers on a paper napkin, and he looked at them without touching his fork. “Three shifts a month,” he said. “Maybe four, some months.” “On top of your regular.” “Yes.” “For how long?”

I had been dreading that question. “I don’t know,” I said. “As long as it takes. As long as they’re here.”

He was quiet a good while. Neal drives a feed truck for the co-op and has for twenty-six years, and he is not a man who rushes toward a sentence. He turned the napkin over. He turned it back.

“Well,” he said at last, “then I guess we’d better start picking up shifts.” “Neal. It’s my family.”

“They’ve been my family since the day you said yes to me,” he said. And he got up and put his plate in the sink.

I did not cry, but I came closer to it than I had in a long time.

The kitchen table in Engstrom

Mark still had to sign. The power of attorney meant his name had to be on the admission papers, and Georgia Moll had told me, kindly, that she could not take anyone on my word alone.

So on a Saturday I drove to Engstrom and put the folder on his kitchen table. His wife, Kara, was at the stove. She gave me a look I could not read and went on stirring.

“I’ll cover the difference,” I said. “Nine hundred a month. It comes out of my overtime, not out of their savings. They keep their sixteen months, Mark, or fifteen, or whatever. You don’t lose a day.”

He read the first page. Then he read it again. His jaw was working. “You can’t keep that up,” he said. “I can keep it up longer than Dad can keep not eating.”

That landed. I watched it land. He looked at the page, and then at the window, and I saw him try to say something and not manage it.

“Dad’s lost sixteen pounds,” I said, quietly. “I’m not saying that to make you feel bad. I’m saying it because someone has to.” Kara put down her spoon. “Mark,” she said.

He picked up the pen. He signed in four places, without reading the rest, the way you sign a form at the dentist’s office.

“Don’t ask me to come,” he said. His voice was flat. “I can’t do it, Patrice. I’ll sign what you need me to sign. But I can’t be there.” “I won’t ask.” “I mean it.”

I did not tell him I understood. I did not understand, not then. I only knew that my brother was very pale, and that when I stood up to go, he did not stand up with me.