The Double Room for Mom and Dad

The anniversary

It took Georgia Moll a week to get everything ready, and when she told me the room could be ready on the second Saturday in October, I laughed out loud on the phone, because it was their anniversary.

Sixty-one years. They were married in the Everly Methodist church in 1965, in the rain, and Mom wore her mother’s dress and a pair of borrowed shoes that pinched.

“I didn’t plan that,” I said.

“I know,” Georgia said. “I looked at the calendar when you called. It seemed like a sign.”

It was a bright morning. Cold, the kind of October day in northwest Iowa that has the whole sky scrubbed blue, with the maples gone yellow along the street and corn trucks rattling down the highway toward the elevator.

I put on my red quilted vest over a navy sweater, and a pair of tan work gloves went in my pocket, because the wind had an edge, and pinned my hair behind my ears.

Neal was already out in the driveway with the truck, in his tan work jacket. We drove to Estherville first.

Dad was dressed. Cassie had helped him into his good gray cardigan, and he sat on the edge of his bed with his hands on his knees, looking at the door.

His chair was in the corner. I mean the recliner, the brown leather one, worn smooth along the left arm where he had rested his elbow every evening since 1989.

He had brought it to the duplex, and then to the home. “You want to take that?” Neal asked him.

Dad looked at the chair for a good while. “I don’t suppose they’ll have one,” he said, and it was the first thing he had said in days that sounded like himself. “We’ll take it.”

So Neal took one end and I took the other. It weighed about eighty pounds, and it was awkward going out the door. Cassie held it open and wiped her eyes.

“Where are we going, Patrice?” Dad asked, shuffling behind us with the aide’s arm under his. “To see Mom.” He stopped in the hallway. “Is she all right?” “She’s waiting for you.”

He did not say anything more, but his hand went to the front of his cardigan and smoothed it flat, the way he used to before church.

The bench

We roped the recliner down in the bed of the truck, and I rode with Dad in the cab. It was thirty miles, and he looked at every field.

The beans were cut and the corn was coming off. A combine was working a quarter section off the highway, and he watched it until it was out of sight.

“Nice crop,” he said, about nothing. “Sixty bushel, those beans.” “I bet,” I said.

Mom had been brought over that morning by the home’s minivan, and a young aide from the center named Becca had sat her down on the bench at the front of the center to wait. I had asked for that.

I had a feeling about how it ought to go. Georgia had agreed, and she had even had the round flower bed by the walk filled with red and pink mums, and the flagpole at the corner stood against the sky, the flag snapping in the wind.

When we pulled in, I saw her before Dad did.

She sat very straight on the bench in her blue wool coat, her white curls combed, her hands folded in her lap, like a woman waiting for a bus she was not sure would come.

The silver minivan sat in the lot behind her, the one that had brought her.

Neal and I climbed down.

The sun was full on us. I could hear my own breath. I heard the truck door.

A man of eighty-five, who had barely eaten a real meal in weeks, climbed down from a pickup truck without his cane and crossed forty feet of parking lot and sidewalk like a boy.

Mom looked up.

For a second, her face was perfectly blank. I felt my heart stop. I thought, she doesn’t know him. This was the one fear I had never said aloud, to Neal or to anyone.

That the nine days had done something to her, that the thread had finally snapped. Then she said, “You’re late, Norm.”

She said it in her ordinary voice, the one she used when he came in from the barn after supper had gone cold. “I know it,” Dad said. His own voice shook. “I got held up.”

He sat down beside her on the bench. She took his hand, the thin spotted one, and set it down on her knee and covered it with her own.

Neither one of them said another word. They sat side by side in the sun with their hands together, looking at the flag.

We untied the recliner and lifted it out of the truck bed, and we carried it up the concrete walk past them, past the flower beds and the flagpole, because I did not know what else to do with my hands.

Neal set his end down by the door and stood looking at the sky for a good long while. I stood holding mine, and I could not see the flagpole anymore.