The Burning Side(57)
You were gone before you left. I was pushed away; what else could I have done?
I pace to the shower, drop my clothes in a heap, and run the water punishingly hot. I want to scorch off the pain. In a choice between two hells, I’d rather be apart than unwanted. I splash scalding water onto my face and clench my jaw. She gave up on us. I build my case against her, corroborating my own memory. Then in one swift motion, I shut the shower off, along with my burning stream of questions.
DEB
August 7–9, 2022
IT’S SUNDAY, AND THE HOUSE is quiet. Billy is tending his fiddle-leaf fig when I ask him to join me at the computer. He pulls up a chair and squints at the screen, his hand on my back.
I take a deep breath and show him a place called Greenwood Hills. Plush, amenity-filled apartments where there’s no maintenance besides basic cleaning, and medical staff is always on deck. It’s spacious enough for grandchildren to stay over, yet insular enough for this life season.
Our house is worth a lot. If we sell it, we can afford this.
I show him the numbers and location, only a half hour from where we are now. We aren’t yet sixty, I say to him. Young enough for something new. I grind my teeth, waiting for him to resist.
But he squeezes my hand and says, “I’ve been thinking about this too.”
“You have?”
“Yep. And wondering what the kids might say.”
I roll my eyes. “Lots, but what else is new?”
He chuckles, his attention on the computer screen. “Do they have full kitchens for your commissions?”
“They do.” I click through a few photos.
“Garages?”
“One car.” I smile. “Plenty to protect your bike from the elements.”
I point to the screen. “There’s also a common room like in The Thursday Murder Club.” I figure Richard Osman can only help us here. I pat Billy’s thigh beside mine and say, “Just something to think about.” When I reach to close the website, he stops me. Scrolls for a few more minutes. Then he leans back. He looks at the quiet house around us, and then at me. “Would you be there?”
I lift a hand to my heart, appalled that he thinks I might send him there alone. “Of course I would.”
He exhales and says, “Then it sounds like home.”
* * *
Two days later, we take a tour of Greenwood Hills. It is sprawling and green. Not very hilly, but there are slopes and this is North Texas, so we let it pass. They couldn’t very well call it Greenwood Slopes.
It is honestly beautiful. There are live oaks and ferns. A koi pond with a footbridge and a weeping willow. Bright flowers everywhere. Someone from a landscaping crew waves as we pass.
After the admissions director shows us around, he tells us to explore at our leisure and then come see him in his office when we’re ready to talk. So we meander the grounds of what might become our first move in decades—and Billy’s last.
We would have an apartment with nine hundred square feet, a third of our Dallas home. I think of the weeks we spent setting up that home. The checklists and paint stirrers and Home Depot runs, the anticipation of traditions and togetherness, of the years we’d spend growing old there. I didn’t think then of how it might end.
We visit the common room, where a big calendar hangs on the back wall boasting visitor performances, mahjong, book clubs, drug trials, and a caretaker support group. “Oh, look,” Billy says. “They have mini golf.”
I nod, noting a baking exchange and wondering if my friends would drive all the way out here to visit me.
We stand back and observe for a few minutes. It’s clean here, and there’s a bounty of direct-care employees, all of whom are patient as they interact with residents. About six of those residents are sitting in massage chairs in front of a big-screen TV, watching Fox Nation with closed captions. They all have medical pendants around their necks, our potential neighbors. Two of them are dozing. We asked the director about other married couples, and he said there are several, one with early-onset. Only one. Although—he looked in my direction—many younger regulars from the broader community attend the caretaker support group, some of them multiple times a week.
I didn’t realize how much this would feel like a medical facility. Smell like a medical facility. I look around the common room and try to appreciate feeling young, but mostly I feel like I don’t belong.
The residents are talking to the television about Medicare requirements and drug names. Bills and gas prices. One man heckles the newscaster with, “Tell that to Jimmy Carter!” To which a woman commands, “Oh, step off it, Larry.” Another woman requests a whatchamacallit, and the staff immediately understands that she wants a Werther’s. She unwraps it with a loud crinkle, while yet another woman asks how to adjust her chair from rolling to kneading. There are very few men here.
On television, the president appears behind a lectern, behind his DC lens. Where he stands, it probably smells of leather and cologne. Where we stand, Lysol and applesauce and Lubriderm. Then the woman with the Werther’s candy points an arthritic finger straight at the president of the United States and says, “That man’s teeth are beautiful. Me, I like sweets too much.” She grins wide, revealing chips and stains. I swallow a chuckle. Beside me, Billy steps forward as though he wants to pull veneers from his pocket. But then the Jimmy Carter man says to the Werther’s woman that he has half a mind to come out of retirement just to fix her teeth.