I'm eighty-seven years old, and I still remember exactly what the paint smelled like when my husband redid our first apartment on the west side of Dayton. Cheap latex, bought on sale at the hardware store on Salem Avenue. Walter didn't live to see forty-five. His heart gave out on a Wednesday, at breakfast, with a piece of toast in his hand that he never got to finish.
I was left with four kids. The youngest, Katie, was still in diapers half the time.
There was no time for grieving. Mornings I drove the kids to school, then went to the laundry service on Third Street, where I pressed tablecloths for a downtown restaurant, and evenings I cleaned an accounting office on the third floor of a building with a broken elevator — it had been out since 1979, I remember because that's the year Katie was born.
Some nights my hands shook from hauling the mop bucket. But the alarm rang at five forty-five every morning, and I got up. Always.
The kids grew up fast, because they had to. Mark, the oldest, was doing the grocery shopping by age twelve and making sure Katie ate dinner before I got home from the second shift. I wanted something better for them than I'd had myself — wanted them to never have to count pennies before payday.
The house on Maple Street, a small two-bedroom with a kitchen, I bought on a mortgage I paid off over eighteen years. The bathroom tile cracked sometime in the nineties, but there was never money to fix it. I stayed there after the kids moved out — first Mark, off to Columbus for work, then Katie got married and moved across town, a ten-minute drive, but she still only called once a week, if that.
Evenings I'd sit on the porch, not much bigger than a welcome mat. I kept geraniums in plastic pots from the dollar store, and my mother's old coffee cup, chipped on the handle, that I drank instant coffee from because the real stuff upset my stomach. Across the street, my neighbor Dorothy kept a canary that sang loudest right at sunset. I loved that.
In September, Katie called and said everyone was coming by Sunday, that it had been too long, that we'd go out somewhere together.
I was so happy. I wore the blue cardigan Mark had brought me once from a business trip to Chicago.
We drove out on the highway, turned off somewhere past the interstate. We pulled up in front of a building with a sign that read "Golden Years Senior Living." Mark took my suitcase out of the trunk — the same one he'd packed the day before, without telling me.
"Mom, this is going to be better for you. You can't manage those stairs on your own anymore."
Katie kissed my cheek and said they'd visit every Sunday. Then they got back in the car and drove off, and I stood there with my suitcase in front of the automatic doors, which, of course, wouldn't open.
Now my day is split into meals at seven, one, and six. A nurse named Amber checks my blood pressure and writes it down on a chart. She's kind, brings me the newspaper sometimes. I'm not neglected — my room is clean, the food is warm, my pills come on a tray in a plastic box marked with the days of the week.
But I don't have my own porch. Instead there's a hallway with a fluorescent light that hums so loud I can hear it through my closed door after nine at night.
I miss that chipped cup. I miss Dorothy's canary. I miss deciding for myself what time to eat breakfast, or whether to get out of bed before nine at all.
They say I need care. Maybe I do. But besides care, I also need someone to ask my opinion before they pack my suitcase.
For the first three months I called Katie every Sunday evening, after the game show in the common room ended, the one everybody watched because there was nothing else on. Katie was always busy. Mark never once visited, said work in Columbus kept him tied up.
Then one Sunday in November, with rain coming down hard outside, my neighbor down the hall, Mrs. Peterson, called me over and said her granddaughter was a lawyer and was coming to visit next week. Asked if I'd like to talk to her.
The granddaughter's name was Rachel, thirty-something as I recall, with a briefcase full of her grandmother's paperwork. She sat with me at a table in the common room, offered me a cookie from a box she'd brought, and asked me straight out whether the house on Maple Street was still in my name.
It was. Nobody had transferred it yet, though Mark had already asked twice over the phone whether it wouldn't be smarter to "get that sorted out, Mom, just in case."
Rachel explained calmly what power of attorney meant, and what a deed transfer meant, and that either one I could refuse, or simply not sign, until I decided for myself what I wanted.
In December, two weeks before Christmas, I asked Amber to call me a cab. She asked where to. I said the notary office on Fifth Avenue, the same one where Walter and I had signed our mortgage papers all those years ago.
I went alone, with a folder holding the deed and my driver's license. I wrote a will — the house on Maple Street would go to Katie and Mark, split evenly, the way it would've gone anyway — but I added one clause: as long as I'm alive, nobody may sell it, rent it out, or remove anything from it without my written consent. I also had it recorded that power of attorney over my bank account, the one my Social Security goes into, belonged only to Amber, and only for the purpose of paying for my stay here — nothing more.
The notary, an older gentleman with reading glasses, asked if I was sure I didn't want to leave that decision to my children. I told him that's exactly why I was leaving it to myself.
Katie called in January, when the filing showed up on the county records. Her voice was pitched high, rushed.
"Mom, what did you do, why didn't you tell us — Mark says now we can't even rent out the house to help cover your stay there —"
I told her, calm as anything, that I was paying for my stay with my Social Security and with what I'd saved over forty years of pressing other people's tablecloths, and that nobody needed to rent the house out, because I was going back to it.
There was quiet on the other end, the kind where all you hear is breathing.
In March they both came, Mark and Katie together, first time since that Sunday with the car. They sat across from me in the common room, Mark holding a printout of the notarized document.
"Mom, we thought this would be safer for you."
"Safer for who, exactly?"
I didn't raise my voice. I poured myself tea from the thermos I keep by my bed, because the coffee here is watered down.
"Did either of you ask me, even once, whether I wanted to be here? Whether I'd rather go back to Maple Street, even if the stairs hurt more than an elevator would?"
Mark had nothing to say. Katie cried, but I didn't stop drinking my tea to comfort her.
In May I hired a home aide, Miss Grace, who comes to the house three times a week, paid out of my own account, the one only Amber and I have access to. I moved out of the senior facility in April, once the weather turned warm. The geraniums had died over the winter, but I bought new ones, same plastic pots from the dollar store.
Dorothy's canary still sings at sunset. I sit on the porch with my mother's cup and listen.
