Page 44 of By A Thread

I missed the man my father had been even as I tried to build a new relationship with who he was now. It was mostly bitter and not enough sweet in this new dynamic.

“Do you recognize your visitor?” the nurse asked.

Dad gave me a cursory once over and a careless shrug. “Should I?”

Logically, I knew it was a disease. But every time the man who raised me, the man who’d handsewn sequins on my jean jacket in fifth grade, the man who’d corralled six female neighbors in our living room the day I got my first period didn’t recognize me, it felt like I lost another little piece of both of us.

The man who loved me most in this world was gone. And most days I was erased from his memories. Likewe’dnever existed. LikeI’dnever existed.

“Hi, Mr. Morales,” I said, pasting on a bright smile that I didn’t feel. “I just came to see if there’s anything you needed from home.”

“Home?” he harrumphed.

I nodded and waited.

He shrugged. “See if Bobby mowed the lawn. I pay the kid ten dollars a week, and he does a five-dollar job. Oh, and bring me my term papers. I can at least grade finals while I’m stuck here.”

It was a C+ day. Grumpy but not too agitated. In Dad’s world, if there was an Ally Morales, she was eight years old, and it was almost summertime.

“Okay,” I agreed. “Would you like any snacks? Your music?”

He didn’t answer. He was back to staring out the window where a slow, icy drizzle had begun.

The nurse tilted her head in the direction of the hall, and I followed her out.

“How’s he doing?” I asked.

“He suffered a broken tibia when he fell out of bed this morning,” she explained.

“Did he break anything else?” I asked, leaning back against the wall.

Falls were especially dangerous with my father’s diagnosis.

“Some bruising and swelling, but no other breaks,” she said.

Thank you, goddesses of gravity.“How’s his pain?”

“With dementia patients, it’s hard to tell.”

Everything was hard with dementia patients, I’d come to learn.

“We’re administering low doses of pain medication every few hours and monitoring him. He’s slept a bit since he got here, and we’re doing our best to keep him in bed for now. Our PT and OT teams are coming in to evaluate him in the morning.”

“How long will he be here?” I asked. At this point, unexpected hospital bills had the power to do more than bankrupt us.

“It’s hard to say at this point. It depends on the therapy teams,” she explained.

“Where’s my wife?” my father demanded from inside the room.

I winced. I’d stopped wondering that decades ago.

“Will your mother be visiting?” the nurse asked me.

I shook my head. “No. She won’t.”

“I’ll let you visit for a while. Try not to get discouraged if he’s agitated,” she said, patting me on the arm.

“Thanks.” I returned to the room where I was a stranger. My father was back to glaring out the window, his food still untouched.