262.🪑 THE TABLE MY SON BUILT FOR MY OLD AGE

Chapter 03 - What the Notebook Said

Claire let me keep the notebook between us until the waitress came. I couldn't make myself order anything. My sister asked for coffee and a slice of lemon pie, then cut the pie into careful quarters without tasting it.

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

“Dad handed it to me this morning. He wanted you to know he hadn't left because of Daniel.”

“What does that last entry mean?”

“It means Paul asked somebody to decide whether Dad could keep living at home.”

I looked again. The words were written on a loose sheet tucked into the back cover, not in Dad's hand. The heading read ROSEWOOD COMMONS — PRELIMINARY INTAKE. Beneath it, the words “behavioral concerns at meals” had been underlined twice in blue ink.

“That isn't what happened,” I said.

“Then someone ought to correct it.”

I remembered Dad at the end of our own dinner table, cutting Daniel’s birthday cake into pieces of exactly the same size. He always gave himself the piece with the least frosting because he claimed to dislike it. I had accepted that claim since childhood without ever asking whether it was true.

For a long time I watched the waitress refill salt shakers at the counter. The ordinary work of the diner offended me. My father had disappeared from my house, my marriage was slipping sideways under my feet, and the world continued measuring salt.

“Did you take Dad to a doctor?”

“Last Tuesday. To his usual clinic. He asked me for a ride.”

“Why didn't he ask me?”

“He said you'd rearranged your work schedule three times that month and he didn't want to do it again.”

This was how my father justified nearly everything: he didn't want to be trouble. For fifteen months I'd mistaken that sentence for proof that my arrangements were working.

Claire turned her cup in its saucer. “The doctor told him his tremor had gotten a little worse. Nothing else significant had changed. He still knows perfectly well what he wants.”

“What does he want?”

“Room. Company. Some control over his life.”

“I'm trying,” I said, and hated the smallness of the words.

“I know you are.” She looked at me directly. “But you won't hear a complaint if you decide every complaint is an accusation.”

When we were little, Claire had been the clever sister, the one who could fix a bicycle chain and talk her way out of detention. I was the dependable one who put away the groceries and made sure Mom had her afternoon tea. At fifty-four, she still spoke as though she could see the weak point in a thing before I could.

“Why did Dad come to you?” I asked.

“Because he was frightened of what would happen if he stayed. And frightened of what would happen if he left.”

“He could have told me.”

“His notebook suggests he did.”

I shut it. Claire took a bite of pie. Neither of us apologized for the years between us, though I felt them pressing against the edge of the table.

“Can I see him?”

“Tomorrow. At the Pine Street Workshop. Ten in the morning. That's what he asked.”

“Why there?”

“He'll tell you.”

Before we left, Claire touched my wrist. “I didn't come back into this family to take him away from you, Maggie.”

Only my mother had called me Maggie. I pulled back so abruptly her hand remained suspended above the table for a moment.

“Don't call me that.”

“Fine.” She put down a few bills. “But one thing hasn't changed. You think being the one who does the work makes you the one who knows best.”

At home, Daniel was doing long division with his tongue caught between his teeth. Paul was scraping a burned casserole into the trash. Both looked up when I came in, and I found myself annoyed that they were waiting for news from me while everything else remained unchanged.

“Grandpa is with Aunt Claire,” I told Daniel. “He's safe.”

“Is he mad?”

“I think he's sad.”

Daniel considered this. “Can sad people come home?”

“Sometimes they need to go somewhere else first.”

He went back to his numbers. Paul followed me into the laundry room and shut the door.

“Did Claire tell you where he is?”

“Enough.”

“I didn't sign him up for anything.”

“Someone wrote that he had behavior problems at dinner.”

Paul leaned back against the dryer. “The woman asked why he ate separately.”

“And that's what you said?”

“I said he got upset. He did, sometimes.”

My father had wept twice since moving in with us. Once after he spilled soup, and once after I brought him home from the hospital, when he couldn't button his own pajama shirt. I'd heard both times from the hallway and given him privacy. It had seemed respectful. Now I wasn't sure whether respect had anything to do with it.

“Who told you to make those calls?”

“Nobody. I thought I was helping.”

“Did you tell them you were his legal representative?”

“No. I told them I was his son-in-law.”

“Then why did Dad think there was already a room?”

Paul rubbed his face. “There was a letter. An information packet. They needed his income, assets, that sort of thing.”

I stared at him. “You gave someone Dad's financial information?”

“Only an estimate.”

My husband had always hated being questioned about money. He kept the household accounts, fixed the furnace, and quietly paid the bills. I handled nearly everything else. We had called it a division of labor, as though marriage were a factory where the two halves of a machine never needed to see one another.

I asked for the Rosewood brochure. He brought it from the drawer beneath the microwave, along with a folded letter addressed to Arthur Bennett. Dad's name appeared above a printed list of monthly costs. Beside the most expensive option, Paul had written, in pencil, “If Larch Street sells.”

“That's his house,” I said.

“I know whose house it is.”

“What were you planning to do with the money?”

“To pay for decent care. What else?”

He spoke too quickly. In twenty-seven years of marriage, I'd learned the signs of his anger and his grief. There was a third expression, not quite either, that I'd seen when the heating business first began losing customers and he pretended everything was fine.

I laid the brochure on the dryer. “Show me the business account.”

Paul looked past me toward the wall clock in the hall. Six forty-seven. Daniel would need a bath soon. There was bread to slice for school lunches. He seemed to consider each household obligation as a possible exit.