Tuesdays in Dad’s Old Aisles

Norma came and stood beside me. She did not say anything. She slipped her hand into mine and held on.

I will not pretend that is the end of anything. Dementia has no end except the one everybody knows. There have been rough Tuesdays since, mornings when Dad stood in the middle of aisle six and could not find a single can that belonged where it was.

On those mornings Agnes sits him down on the step stool and brings him coffee. Walter pulls a case up beside him and says, “Help me out with this, boss.” Dad opens it and he is a stocker again.

Some mornings he does not know my name. He always knows the apron.

The Sunday after, Neil came to Vera’s for dinner. He sat at the end of the table across from Dad and me, and his mother put the roast in front of him and did not say a word.

She did not speak to him all through the meal. It was not an accident. She passed him the potatoes the way you pass something to a stranger.

Afterward, in the sunroom among the violets, I heard her say one thing to him, low. “Your uncle carried you on his back through that stockroom.”

Neil nodded and did not answer. Then he stacked the dinner plates and carried them to the kitchen without being asked.

Later Vera told me, drying a dish, that he had been frightened since August, and that fright was a reason and never a pardon. I thought that was exactly right.

Neil does not owe me a speech. He owes my father a Tuesday, and he pays it.

Every Tuesday now, we are in by seven. I wear the burgundy cardigan because the cooler aisle runs cold. Dad wears his tan zip jacket, and over it the green apron with his name tag.

Norma lifts a hand from register one. Agnes has the coffee ready. Walter leaves a case of something by aisle six and swears he does not know how it got there.

Neil stands at the end of the aisle with the log in his hand, writing the time at seven-oh-five. He keeps two paper cups with him and sets one on the shelf beside my father.

“Morning, Art.”

“Morning, son,” Dad says. He does not always know which son. Neil answers to all of them.

And my father lifts a can of cream of mushroom in each hand, and turns them label out, and sets them on the shelf as straight as a ruler. Down the aisle, Dolores Quade’s cart waits its turn.

I stand a step behind him in the clean morning light, holding the empty cart, and I do not need to hold his arm anymore.

The name tag on his bib catches the light, and he knows where he is.