Free Wait Until Tomorrow by Pat MacEnulty Page A

much. Occasionally, I’ll snap at my mother when she says something absurd. Other times I’ll just answer the question and move on. Everyone who has had a parent lose his or her mind knows the shock of the first time. Every single one of us thought it would never happen to our parents. Sure, old people in the movies or on TV are ditzy as hell, but not our parents. Then it happens right in front of us. And if it happened to those gods of our childhood, we can no longer deny it will happen to us. Lord, let me die first becomes our unspoken prayer.
    Emmy is not happy. To her, my mother is a rival. And sometimes I think my mother feels the same way about her. My mother never took to grandmotherhood the way some people do. Don’t get me wrong—my mother thinks Emmy is lovely. But she doesn’t feel the same way that Hank’s parents seem to feel about grandchildren—something to dote on and brag about.
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    My mother is not convinced by our arguments that assisted living is the way to go. She does not want to leave her job, and who can blame her? She wants to go back to her piano, her choir, her pipe organ at the church. She will struggle up the narrow steps every Sunday to the balcony of the church where she will lift her hands and make music happen.
    My brother shrugs his shoulders. This is what she wants.
    â€œBut it won’t work,” I tell him.
    â€œWe have to let her try,” he says.
    So I pack mother’s toilet seat into the trunk and her walker into the backseat of the rental car that David is using to take her home. Hank and Emmy come out onto the porch. They are both
way more cheerful than I am. I hug David goodbye and then hold my mother. Nothing about this feels right. I am helpless to do anything about it. She’s as happy to be going home as Hank and Emmy are to see her go.
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    So my mother leaves and I turn my attention to getting Emmy ready for her new school. She is going into the lion’s den alone. She will need fashionable clothing, not just the hand-me-downs from the neighborhood teenager who happens to be her size and a couple of years older. It’s been a lean summer for me, and Hank with his usual largesse spots her the customary C-note to go shopping for school clothes. Well, I decide, she’ll have to figure out a way to impress the kids with something other than her sartorial savoir faire.
    â€œI’m not worried,” she says with a weak smile. The kid is scared shitless. Me, too. And this year I have no one to carpool with. No one else at the school lives in the hinterlands where we live. That means that for the next two and a half years I’ll be driving a half hour there and back every single morning during rush hour and twenty minutes there and back every afternoon. That’s almost two hours a day in a car. And of course I’ll be calling on my fiction writing skills fairly regularly as I make up excuses for why we’re late almost every day.

FIVE
    AUGUST 2004
    The third time my mother goes into the hospital that summer is, I decide, the last time. No more consulting with brothers. No more trying to patch together a system of care for her. She is eighty-six years old. She is crippled. Her mind is faltering. Her independent life is over.
    I feel as if my chest has caved in. I walk around carrying a tray of pain as if it were hors d’oeuvres. No one wants any. A friend asks me why I don’t just give myself permission to own the pain. “Go ahead and grieve,” she says. I put that on my “to do” list. But first I have to go and take her away from her old life for good. On top of it all, another hurricane is heading for the North Carolina coast where she lives.
    On Monday August 1, 2004, I’m back at the rental car place because, once again, the Blue Monster is in the shop. I’m now on a first-name basis with the manager. He gives me a compact, and I drive to Edenton with a purpose. I am getting