won’t be able to find her way back to her room. So I always take her. The sun and fresh air help keep her spirits up. A little.
She squeezes my arm. “Tell me about… Tell me…”
I cover my hand over hers and wait. Screwing up her face, she taps her forehead with the heel of her hand.
“You know,” she prompts, frowning up at me.
“About what, Mom? About school?”
She smiles, relieved. “Yes, school.”
“Well, final exams start Monday. My A-students are upset that I won’t exempt them,” I say with a shrug, and her smile widens.
“I’m sure they’re ready… ready for…” We make the curve in the path that leads toward the fountain. “You know… the… time.”
“Summer,” I say. “Yeah, they’re all ready for summer.”
“And you?” She looks up at me, her brow creasing with worry. “Are you going… back…”
I frown. “Back to Sainte-Anne’s? No, Mom. I did that last year.”
The summer teaching program at Université Sainte-Anne in Church Point, Nova Scotia is a top-notch professional development opportunity for francophone education. Because of a grant Paula wrote, all of the French teachers at Northside took part in the four-week session last July.
While I was gone, Mom drove her car into a dry cleaner’s.
She could have hurt someone, but she didn’t. The physical damage was mostly broken glass and her scuffed up Honda, but she was a wreck. Nonc stayed with her until Val could fly in from Atlanta. Before the accident, my sister and I had both noticed her forgetting words. Repeating stories. Seeming a little confused.
But she was only sixty-two.
Sixty-two-year-olds don’t get Alzheimer’s. Except when they do.
Val had forbidden me from coming home from Sainte-Anne’s early, saying she could take family leave for a few weeks to help sort things out. She started making lists of assisted living communities and looking through Mom’s finances.
They were a mess.
Mom had felt so guilty about the accident, she didn’t resist at all about giving us power of attorney or moving her into assisted living.
But she flat-out refused Val’s offer to go to Atlanta.
She couldn’t leave her friends. She couldn’t leave David. She couldn’t leave the dance studio.
She never said it—not in front of us—but she couldn’t leave Grant either.
Grant Landry. My father. The man who left her six years ago.
She doesn’t ask for him every day. Just the bad ones.
We make the turn around the fountain. “How’s… your… lady?”
This is something else she asks about. “Rebecca and I broke up, Mom.” I don’t add that it was almost a year ago.
She squeezes my arm. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Beau.”
I don’t tell her this isn’t the first time she’s told me she’s sorry. I don’t tell her again that Rebecca is working on a Disney cruise ship in a job that my mother would, to this day, kill for.
“And when do you dance?” Mom asks, eyes shining. If she loses all her words, dance will be the last to go.
“I taught ballroom last night, and I’ll teach Cajun Saturday afternoon.”
Mom beams as though this is the greatest news in the world. It’s hardly new. I worked at La Fête Dance Studio through high school and college, and I only stopped when I started teaching full-time.
But when Mom got sick, Nonc needed some help covering all the studio’s classes, and the extra money isn’t bad. I don’t need much because I don’t have much, but Mom’s IRA isn’t as solid as it could be, and her social security check doesn’t cover the full cost of her expenses at Camelia Court. So Val and I kick in a little every month.
Val insists on kicking in a little more. She’s a CPA who married a tax attorney, so I didn’t argue too much about that. Besides, I know she wishes she could visit more often, but she and Will have two kids younger than five and two careers on the fast-track, so it’s hard.
But we’ve worked it out. Val calls Mom on Saturdays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. I visit on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays—and call when I can—and Nonc comes on Mondays. Mom’s covered. We didn’t put her in Camelia Court so we could forget about her. If she skips breakfast, we know about it. If she stubs her toe, we know about it. If she cries all morning for my dickhead father, we know about it.
And it means we all see that she is steadily getting worse.
But right now, the sun is shining. Mom is smiling, asking me about last night’s ballroom dance class. She asks me twice