“Roger, stop shouting and listen,” I said. I was sitting on the edge of the guest bed, with the baby asleep against my shoulder and Edna snoring softly beside me, and I spoke in the voice I use at three in the morning. “Open the gray suitcase on the chair. Everything inside is exactly what you left me with.” At midnight, I had unzipped that suitcase and taken out his fishing shirts, his tackle box and his lucky hat. Behind him, I could hear ice rattling in glasses and the steel guitar going quiet, one string at a time.
Roger found a baby monitor receiver on top, switched on, with the volume turned all the way up. Under it was a door alarm, a sippy cup, a toddler spoon and a small voice recorder. On the recorder, I had saved Edna asking, for the fifth time that evening, what day it was. My card said, Wake at two. Edna is at the front door. The baby is teething. The car keys are in the freezer. Good luck, dear. I heard him press the button. A thin, old, confused voice filled the pool bar. “What day is it?” it asked. “Roger, what day is it?”
He did not hang up. I heard him walk away from the bar and sit down heavily, and I heard him play the recording a second time, and then a third. At last, Roger said, in a voice I barely knew, “That is my mama.” “Yes,” I said. “She asked me that eleven times last Tuesday. I answered every time as if it were the first. That is what love sounds like at two in the morning, Roger. It is patience for someone who cannot thank you.” He was crying. “I thought she was fine,” he said. “She is not fine,” I said. “She is your mother, and I need you here while there is still a her to be here for.”
A gray suitcase opened at a hotel pool bar gave one husband the weekend to bring his wife back to the back porch in Ocala.
Roger came home on the first flight out of Key West. He did not say goodbye to the men at the marina. He arrived at dawn in a rented car, still wearing the same collared shirt, with the gray suitcase in his hand. Edna was at the kitchen table in her robe, eating toast with jam. Roger stopped in the doorway. “Mama,” he said. She looked up, and her whole face lit. “Roger!” she cried. “You are late for school.” He crossed the kitchen in three steps, knelt by her chair and put his forehead against her knee. He stayed there a long time, and she patted his hair.
I gave him my terms on the back porch that evening, with the grandchildren finally asleep. He would take the night watch, ten to six, every night, with the door alarm beside him. He would sit with Edna for two hours each afternoon so I could rest. The sixty four hundred dollars would be replaced in our retirement account from the sale of his boat and his tournament trophies. And before the end of the summer, he would meet with the elder care office and set up respite help, so that neither of us would ever again be the only one. He agreed to every word, and his hand shook as he signed my list.
Our daughter, Melissa, arrived on Saturday after a double shift, still in her scrubs. She stood in the doorway and looked at her father, who was feeding the baby a bottle on the couch, and then at me, and she started to cry. “Mama, I did not know,” she said. “I thought Daddy was helping. I thought you were fine.” I held her and rocked her the way I used to when she was small. “Everyone thinks I am fine, honey,” I said. “That is the trouble with being fine.” Roger looked up from the baby, and for once he did not look away.
The church came on Sunday. Pastor Bill brought a casserole, and the ladies of the Tuesday circle arrived with a schedule they had written on poster board. Each woman took a day, and each day a different pair of hands sat with Edna so that I could sleep, shower or walk to the end of the street. One of them, Dot, who had cared for her own husband through his last years, took my chin in her fingers and said, “Linda, nobody should carry this alone. You have been carrying it for a year.” I cried right there on the porch, and nobody hurried me.
The money consequences were real. The tournament kept the entry fee, and the airline kept the change fee. Roger sold his bass boat and his trailer to a man in Dunnellon, and he paid back the retirement account in full. His friends at the marina teased him for a week, and then one of them, Hank, called quietly to ask how to find help for his own father. Roger gave him the number of the elder care office. When he hung up, he stood in the kitchen with the phone in his hand and said, “Lin, I think I just did something useful.”
My mother, Ruth, who passed eleven years ago, spent the last of her strength caring for my father, and nobody ever thought to ask if she needed a break. In her name, I started the Ruth Fund. It pays for a few hours of respite care each week for family caregivers in Marion County who are looking after a parent with dementia. In the first season, we reached twenty two homes. A man of seventy, who had not left his house in a year, drove to the grocery store alone and called me from the parking lot just to say thank you.
On a golden morning in October, Roger took the three grandchildren to the pond behind our house with three cane poles and a can of worms. Edna rode along in a wheelchair, wrapped in a quilt, with a straw hat on her head. I stood on the porch and watched them. The baby laughed at a dragonfly. The six year old caught a bluegill and held it up like a trophy. And Edna, looking at her son with a face that was suddenly clear, said, loud enough for me to hear across the grass, “Roger, you are a good boy.” He bowed his head over the water, and I did not breathe.
