He knows me about half the time.
On the other half I’m “the young man who does the yard,” which I have decided to find funny, mostly.
There is no version of this where I get him back the way he was.
The house on Ridgemont was sold.
My decision, and I made it alone, and Ruth told me to take a week and I took six.
It paid for the ramp, the bathroom, four years of Renata’s hours, and the difference between a facility bed and a bedroom with his own window.
He never asked about it.
Not once.
Delphine comes on Sundays.
She has never once been late, in two years, and she never mentions the sign-in book, and I have never made her.
That is our arrangement and it is working.
I have the rose bushes back.
That’s the part I want to end on, because it is the only thing in this whole story that I did purely because I wanted to.
Vonetta ripped them out.
They were my mother’s — planted in 1996, four canes, the fussy kind you have to prune at exactly the wrong time of year — and the first thing I did when I got the house keys back, before the sale, before anything, was drive over there and dig up what was left of the root crowns with a shovel out of the garage.
