The Girl Who Brings the Coffee

“All in favor,” Mike said, and he raised his hand at his own kitchen table like we were the township board deciding on gravel for the north road.

Scott’s hand went up on the phone screen, propped against the sugar bowl. He was in Denver, in a gray office with a window behind him, and his hand rose slowly, like it weighed something.

I kept mine flat on the oilcloth. Mike looked at it, then at me, then wrote something on the yellow legal pad he had brought out for the occasion.

“Two to one,” he said. “That’s decided, then. Dad goes to Prairie Rose in Fargo on the first of October, and we list the house in the spring when the market comes back.”

“Dad doesn’t get a vote?” I asked. My voice came out quieter than I wanted it to. It always does with Mike. He is five years older, and some things never move.

“Dad thought it was 1994 on Tuesday, Lori,” Scott said from the phone. “He asked me if the Vikings still had Warren Moon. That’s not a man who votes on his own care.”

“Nine thousand eight hundred dollars a month,” I said. “I looked it up. That’s what Prairie Rose charges for the memory wing. That’s his whole house in about a year and a half.”

Mike tapped the legal pad with his pen. “That’s what the house is for. That’s what Mom and Dad saved for. Nobody’s getting rich here. We’re keeping him alive and safe.”

“He is alive,” I said. “He’s alive every single morning. I see him every single morning.”

Mike set the pen down then. He folded his hands, and I recognized the gesture.

It was Dad’s gesture from the elevator office, the one he used before he told a farmer the moisture was too high and the price would be docked.

“You drive a school bus, Lori,” Mike said. “You’re not a nurse. You can’t watch him at night. You can’t lift him if he falls. We’re not going to wait until he’s lying on the bathroom floor for two days.”

That was the line that went in and stayed. Not because it was cruel exactly, but because he said it like I had never thought of it myself, like I had not lain awake with that exact picture for a year.

I picked up my keys. Scott said, “Lori, come on, don’t leave mad,” and Mike said, “Let her go, she’ll come around,” and both of those things were said about me while I was still in the room.

I drove home with the radio off.