good reasons for that. Besides, you know that I need to live alone.”
“Nobody needs to live alone. You’re just more comfortable that way. A little discomfort might do you good.”
Lila is squinting so hard her brown eyes have almost disappeared.
“Look, dear.” I try to make my voice softer, more charming. I know how stubborn my granddaughter is. By pushing her I am just pushing her away. “Your sister needs your level head. You’ve always had more common sense. Besides,” I say, “it must be financially difficult for you to afford your own apartment. Living with your sister makes sense on so many levels.”
“I need my own space, Gram, whether you believe it or not. It’s not that easy around here and I need a place to go where I can lock the door and be alone.”
I lean forward. I want my grandchildren, and everyone I love, to be strong and tough. Sometimes that requires my giving them a little shove. “Who ever said becoming a doctor was going to be easy? Life is not supposed to be easy, Lila. Easy is a cop-out.”
Lila has darker hair and more freckles than her sister. Gracie is pale of skin, hair, and eyes. Gracie often looks washed out, but when she’s happy, she is lit by an inner light. Lila always looks strong and vibrant and, at the moment, angry. She is a spotlight to her sister’s candle.
I don’t look away from her gaze. If Lila wants a staring contest, I will win. She should know that much by now. I say, “So we’ll all gather at your house then, for Easter. I can’t fit everyone into my room at the home, and your mother gets too stressed out when she has to host these kinds of gatherings. You and your sister will help me, won’t you?”
Lila opens her mouth to speak, but the nurse comes in then, a clipboard in her arms, announcing in a bullhorn voice that she is here to check me out. Louis is one step behind her. I’m not concerned that our conversation is cut short. If Lila has something else to say, I’m sure she’ll track me down and let me hear it.
WHEN I lay my hand on the doorknob of my room at the Christian Home for the Elderly, I am suddenly so weak I have a hard time turning it. I didn’t realize how shaken the accident had left me until then. But I feel better with each step inside. My room reminds me of the hotel suites where I grew up. I am safe in this place, which reduces my whole life to one room. In old-age homes, as in hotels, personal taste and unique touches are necessary to distinguish your space from that of your neighbor next door. It is your possessions—your favorite chair, your grandfather clock, your large black-and-white photograph of every single one of your children smiling at the same moment—that make it home, not a mortgage or a backyard or a husband or a view. This is how my parents lived their entire lives, and this is how I am able to feel close to them now. I prefer feeling their presence in this room to confronting their dead selves in the middle of the road in the middle of the town that I have lived in for most of my adult life.
We lived in three different hotel suites while I was growing up, in three different cities. One in Atlantic City, one in New York City, and the last in St. Louis. It was in that hotel suite that Patrick courted me, and it was in that hotel suite that I left my parents behind when I headed east as a new wife.
I met my husband when I was twenty-three years old, and already an old maid. My two sisters had long since married. I lived with my mother and father in the hotel my father ran. I had graduated from college the year before, and upon my return, the few friends I had left from the area called me a snob within my hearing and ignored me when I spoke to them directly. I didn’t care. I was proud of my degree, a Bachelor of the Arts in Nutrition. I was content to live a life that consisted of going to church each morning with Mother and eating dinner with her and my father each night. I was never one who needed much company.