Page 82 of Thursdays at Orange Blossom House
‘It won’t get better, Dad. And do you really want to spend your life watching her?’
‘But it’s not right to put her in a home.’
‘Not right for whom?’ There’s steel in her voice, but there needs to be. She has to be the parent now; it’s her law to lay down.
‘For your mother.’
His hand drops and she sees the tears clinging on under his eyes.
‘Sorry to be tough, Dad, but there’s one of her, and two of us, and no one else is coming to help us with this. We have to look after ourselves too, or we’ll wear out. And we’d be no good for her like that.’
He rubs his hand over the table top, like he’s trying to sand it. Concentric circles.
‘Who would pay for it?’ he says softly. ‘Would we have to sell this house?’
‘No,’ she says, because she’s been thinking about this for a while and she’s formulated a plan. ‘You need somewhere to live. I’ll ask Peter and John to help with the cost of the home.’
‘You can’t ask them!’
‘Why not?’
Although she knows the answer. It’ll be the same answer as when she suggested a few years ago that her brothers could help pay for renovations to the house that they’d jointly inherit one day anyway. Her father’s already told her that the house is being left to the boys, given that Annette has a husband and doesn’t need the money. Patricia is to inherit any cash they have left in their bank account. Apparently she won’t need more than that because she’s just a single woman with no dependants.
‘They have families to support.’
Patricia glares at him. ‘You and Mum are their family too.’
Now they’re glaring at each other.
‘All right,’ she says after a minute or so has passed. ‘We’ll take out a mortgage on the house.’
‘That means they’ll inherit a debt!’
‘Dad, they’re both richer than Croesus and they never help you out,’ she almost spits. She’s fed up to the eye teeth of her brothers being held up as the family paragons when they can’t be bothered to phone more than once every few months and they visit on the twelfth of Never. ‘Not one cent. It’s about time, I’m afraid. I can’t afford to pay for it, nor can I afford to stop working to be here full-time to look after her.’
In the silence that follows, she can almost hear the sound of them both fuming about their separate grievances.
‘We’ll get a mortgage,’ her father says at last, so quietly she almost misses it.
A second of laughter escapes her. He’d rather go to the bank for the money than put out his precious sons.
‘Sure, Dad,’ she says.
She pushes off the countertop, feeling weary. Her neck is still hurting. She really wants to just lie down on her bed and sleep until it’s time to go to yoga on Thursday. But she won’t do that. It wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t be caring or comforting.
‘I’ll start making dinner,’ she says, although it’s much too early. ‘Maybe you’d like to go for a walk? Mum probably won’t wake up for a while, and I can keep an eye on her.’
He nods and pushes himself up to standing. Tucking the newspaper under his arm, he walks towards the back door without so much as looking in her direction. A punishment, probably, for forcing him to have a conversation he never wanted to have. It wasn’t one she wanted to have either.
She wonders if that ever occurs to him. That none of this is what she really wants, but it’s what she’s prepared to do. Because she loves them. Even if she’ll never be sure that they love her back.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Meditation is the part of class that Dorothy likes the least, even though she really wants to be good at it. Sandrine is fond of saying that it’s the whole reason yoga postures exist – to prepare the body for meditation – but Dorothy would rather do an hour of standing poses than five minutes of meditation. Each time she feels like she did as a small child pretending to have afternoon naps at kindergarten. She would lie down with the others and close her eyes. She’d hear the teacher walking around, then try to time it so she could open her eyes and see if everyone else was really asleep or if there was another child who was also awake. There never was. And if the teacher caught her she’d be in trouble. Which she could never understand, because she wasn’ttryingto stay awake, she justwasawake and didn’t know how to make herself fall asleep.
Sometimes in class, when she’s sitting on a blanket with her legs crossed, trying to keep her spine long and straight and focus on her breathing, she worries that Sandrine is going to find out that she’s not really focusing on her breathing but instead letting her brain whirr through a thousand things. Sometimes she thinks it’s like having a mind full of mosquitoes with that irritating little whine going on all the time. The difference is that her mental mosquitoes never come in to land and draw blood. If they did, it would mean Dorothy could think about just one thing at a time. Like her breathing.
Today she’s thinking about the fact that her ligaments are getting so loose with the pregnancy that it’s more comfortable to sit than it used to be, but for a shorter period of time, because then things start to ache. And if the baby moves around that’s an extra distraction.
