Free Where We Are Now by Carolyn Osborn Page A

it—to spend her last days here?
    I drove to Uncle George’s office without calling first and found he had a ramp of his own. Lucias Atkinson was pushing his wheelchair up it while Jean waited in the car. When everybody cleared out, I said, “Miss Kate’s in a horrible place.”
    He shrugged slightly; the movement of his shoulders brought liveliness to his body, then he slumped again.
    â€œI’d take her home if I could. Jean’s got enough on her plate just looking after me. And Lucy … you know she’s too nervous, too fragile, to take anybody on. Mother’s temper’s so bad she runs people off, and she won’t curb her tongue. I don’t think she can anymore. If there’s a better place, it isn’t here. I’ve looked.” His lips settled into a decided line.
    â€œBut it’s so dark and smelly. I don’t think it’s clean either.” His apparent disregard for Grandmother’s needs infuriated me.
    â€œYou should have seen Miss Kate’s house before I moved her. She got so she didn’t care about anything, left her clothes where they fell, never washed a dish.”
    â€œWhat about Maggie?”
    â€œMaggie died a couple of years ago. Before she did Mother accused her of drinking all the sherry. Everybody I sent over afterward gave up. She said they were stealing the spoons, her change, her clothes.”
    â€œShe wants to go back to her own house.”
    â€œI know. That’s a dream … just a dream. Old people have to have them.”
    For a moment I hated Uncle George. He was so at ease with the irremediable. Sitting there all broken, living his own dream, coming to the office every day, piling up his mountains of paper, refusing to throw out a single contract, doing business as usual except doing more now on the phone. His inability to change, my own inability to change him, made me despise us both.
    What could I do for my grandmother? Take her to Texas? Could she make the trip? I had a husband, two little girls, the house and a job at the university press. Marshall and I relied on that income. Who would look after a difficult old lady? My mother and I had lived with Grandmother, but I couldn’t let her die with me.
    I had nothing more to say to Uncle George. I could only glare at him. He and I could manage our lives and other people’s. We couldn’t take care of Miss Kate as well as she deserved. He could look after a whole family including a retarded child who lived at his farm. He didn’t have to help with Jean’s children from her previous marriage. When he asked about my daughters, as he always did, I saw he intended to look to the future, and was, by example, directing me to do the same. I walked out of his office sighing.
    Somebody in town had decided to prettify the square. They had hauled in dirt and laid grass around the foot of the Confederate veterans’ monument and cannons on the corners. Franklin had become a bedroom community for Nashville and for my family. Miss Kate spent most of the day in hers. Jean would pick George up, and when lunch was over, he’d take a long nap in his.
    After seeing Miss Kate in the nursing home for the first time, I made more frequent trips to Tennessee, sometimes with my husband and children. I began to realize that Uncle George was sentimental about children in general yet had no real desire to understand them. Miss Kate couldn’t rememberwho they were. Of course her forgetfulness was, in part, the effect of her hemorrhage. In part she wasn’t interested in great-grandchildren. Sally and Kate were too many generations removed and lived too far away. She’d never had to tell them, “Stay out of Uncle George’s room.”
    The children were too young to bring to her funeral two years later. They wouldn’t have understood why a solemn quartet waited behind her coffin until one blew a single note on the pitch pipe before the two men