The Double Room for Mom and Dad

The months

Mark did not call.

Not that week, and not the next. I sent a text, a photograph of Mom and Dad in the courtyard with the bird feeder, and he did not answer it.

A week after that, Kara called me, quietly, from the garage, and said, “He looked at the picture for an hour. He just can’t, Patrice. Give him time.”

I gave him time. I had other things to do.

The first of the month came, and I paid my share to the center, nine hundred dollars from our checking account, and I put the receipt in my notebook beside the list of fourteen no’s.

I worked four extra shifts that first month. Some Saturdays I came home so tired I sat in the truck in the driveway and did not move for ten minutes.

And they were good. That is what I want to tell you. They were better than good.

Dad gained back seven pounds by the middle of November.

He sat in his chair by the east window every morning with his coffee and his farm report on the little radio Neal had brought from the shed, and Mom sat beside him knitting something that never seemed to get finished.

She still lost her words. She still, some afternoons, asked where the children were, meaning Mark and me at ages six and nine. But she never again called the front desk to ask for Norm, because Norm was where she could see him.

One evening in November I stopped by and found the two of them asleep in their chairs with the lamp on, her head tipped against his shoulder, the radio murmuring about the price of soybeans.

I turned off the lamp. I stood there a minute in the dark with my hand over my mouth.

The Sunday before Thanksgiving

Georgia Moll called me the first week of November with an idea. “Your folks never had an anniversary, honey. They had a moving day. Let me put out a cake.”

I told her I did not think Dad could manage a crowd. “Then ask the church,” she said. “Ask everyone in Everly who ever ate a ham sandwich at their table.”

So on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, after the late service, the Everly Methodist people drove in to Spencer. They came in pickups, in the church van, and in the back seat of Aunt Leona’s Oldsmobile.

By two o’clock the dining room held seventy-one folding chairs and every one was taken. I counted them, because counting is what I do when I am nervous.

Leona, Dad’s sister, came in behind her walker with a sheet cake from the Everly bakery. The men from the co-op came in clean caps. Mrs. Lindgren, who had taught Mark and me Sunday school, came in her good wool hat.

Becca had done Mom’s hair. Mom wore her blue dress and a corsage of white carnations, and every few minutes she touched it to be sure it was still there.

Dad wore his good cardigan and sat at the head table in the recliner. He would not sit in anything else. Two men from church had carried it in from the corner room that morning, and nobody laughed.

Pastor Hal Dykstra, who has been our pastor since 1998, said it looked like a throne. “It’s a chair,” Dad said. “But it’s mine.”

Mom pulled a plain chair up beside him, close enough that the arms touched, and took his hand.

Then they came past the head table in a line. Every one of them stopped at the place where the two chairs met, and every one of them said the same thing, one way or another.

Mrs. Lindgren took Mom’s face in both her hands. “Elaine, you look like a bride,” she said, and Mom said, “I was one once, in the rain.”