Page 12 of Leave It to Us
“Ican’ttravel,” she interrupted. “Who takes care of my mother while I’m gone?”
Pat nodded. “I know we’ve had this conversation before, and I totally get your feelings on the situation. Plus, I realize that this particular scenario is different. But ...”
Yvonne had known thatbutwas coming, and she resisted the urge to frown at the only person she’d been able to confide in during the last few years.
“You can’t do it all,” Pat went on. “And you shouldn’t have to. Your mother has three daughters, and sending a check or dropping money sporadically on your Cash App doesn’t make up for them not helping you more.”
“Girl, you already know I agree with what you’re saying. But I’ve also got to keep it pushin’. I can’t sit around and wait for people to act right—especially not my sisters. They are who they are.” Even though she struggled to understand how the three of them had been raised in the same house but turned out so drastically different, Yvonne had never been the type to wait for anybody to do anything for her.
“You should hold them more accountable instead of just brushing off their nonsense,” Pat continued.
But Yvonne was tired as hell of being a second mother to her younger sisters. She was exhausted from trying to keep her family afloatwhen the universe seemed to want to tear them apart. This had been going on for far too long, and she was just over it.
“I’m not begging them to do a damn thing for our mother. They’re grown; they can make their own decisions.” She held up a hand when Pat opened her mouth to say something else.“But”—she punctuated the word with a raise of her brows and a curt nod—“I’m not down for any bullshit from either of them this summer. I’m going to go along with this renovation thing, but only on the condition that when we sell this house, we each put up a portion of our proceeds to cover the renovations to Mama’s house. This way, I don’t have to use the rest of my savings to get it done.”
“Oh. Okay, that sounds like a plan. But how do you think they’ll react to it? I mean, they really shouldn’t need to be told to help their mother, the woman who raised and took care of them.” Pat was an only child, and her parents were still happily together. They’d celebrated fifty-one years of marriage earlier this year. She was lucky in that regard.
“I already mentioned it to them after we left the lawyer’s office, when we were still trying to figure out what to do,” she said. “We’ve been going back and forth via text in the days since then, but I think we just need to get this started so we can get it finished sooner.”
Pat stood as she stuffed her phone into the back pocket of her jeans. “That’s probably a good idea. Keep me posted on when you’re leaving and if you need to vent—which you probably will—while you’re away. You know I’m always here.”
“I know,” Yvonne replied, and waved as Pat left the office.
Pat had lent her that ear to vent on more occasions than she could count, and she appreciated her friend for that. But she was going to try to get through this summer with her sisters without complaints or headaches—hopefully.
There used to be a time when it wasn’t a task to do that, during those summers spent at the summerhouse. That wasn’t to say she and her sisters had never had any disagreements or near-physical fights, butback then they’d lived in the same house, so apologies usually came quickly, and then it was back to being all each other had. That’s the way they used to see it, like it was them against the world—the Butler sisters against Freda, mostly. Even though Yvonne was usually riding the fence in those cases, since she’d been the only one to figure out how to deal with their mother with minimal fuss—she would just do whatever Freda said without argument. Lana and Tami, on the other hand, had thought that made absolutely no sense. Thinking back on those times, Yvonne realized that was where the now deeply rooted discord between her and her sisters had begun to settle in.
In the past six months, Freda’s right hand hadn’t been working as well as it had before. The physical therapy she’d started while in the rehab facility five weeks after the stroke had continued on into the following year. A therapist had come to their house to facilitate the sessions until Freda had been forced to retire from her job as a district superintendent and her medical benefits had ceased. The grueling task of monotonous paperwork and repetitive phone calls that came next finally resulted in her being approved for Social Security benefits and, subsequently, Medicare.
With that process taking almost seven months, Yvonne had started paying for the physical therapy sessions out of her own savings account. To her credit, Lana had taken over payments for the speech therapy while they waited for the new medical benefits to come through. Those appointments had been far fewer than the physical therapy, which had started again over the last three weeks.
Her mother dropped the fork she’d been holding with her left hand. “I’m finished,” she announced.
Yvonne had cooked a pot of spaghetti after she’d arrived home from school a few hours before. Now she and her mother were sitting at thekitchen table, which had seen more than its share of meals over the forty-two years they’d lived in the house. When they’d all been home, only breakfast was eaten in the kitchen. Dinner and all holiday meals had been in the dining room, but that table mostly held mail separated in piles of medical versus household bills now.
“You ate a lot,” she said to her mother. “You must’ve worked up quite an appetite at therapy this afternoon.”
“She gets too smart,” was Freda’s response as she sat back in her chair.
Alfreda Hanson-Butler’s once long and thick dark-brown hair had thinned significantly over the years but still had length, which was now heavily streaked with gray. Yvonne washed it every two weeks, greased her scalp, and styled it in two braids, just like Freda had done for each of her girls when they were young.
“Every time I tell her it hurts, she tells me to keep going,” Freda continued. “That’s abuse.”
In the months immediately following the stroke, her mother’s speech had been heavily slurred, and she’d paused constantly to try to get the words to coordinate correctly in her mind. Now, as a result of the speech therapy, her words were 95 percent clear the majority of the time, even if her cognitive skills were beginning to decline. Her neurologist had indicated at the last appointment that this was probably a combination of the stroke and Freda inching toward seventy-two years old.
“Her job is to help you become more proficient in using your right side, Mama. I’m sure that’s all she’s trying to do.”
“Don’t defend her. She’s getting paid by the state no matter what, so you know she doesn’t give a damn if I get better. It’s not like when I was going to the private doctors on my other insurance.”
She was referring to the insurance she’d paid for out of her paycheck every two weeks—the PPO plan she’d selected, and the doctors she’d researched and approved of. In Freda’s mind, the state-run clinics and doctors were barely competent. Yvonne could admit that wassometimes definitely the case, based on the area the provider was in and the appearance of said office. The fact that the proceeds from exorbitant medical charges weren’t trickling down to the decor of those locations or the supplies the doctors in those facilities used was often woefully apparent. Still, it was all that was available to Freda at the moment. It was unfortunate that this was the benefit Freda had paid into since she was sixteen years old and had taken her first job. And for a woman who held three degrees in education and had worked her way up from scrubbing bathrooms on the evening shift of a cleaning service to taking meetings with the mayor and on some occasions the governor and other statewide officials involved in the Boston education system, everything the Social Security Administration and Medicare were offering her was a painful slap in the face.
“I know, Mama. I’ll give her a call in the morning to make sure we’re all on the same page with your treatment and how it’s making you feel.” At that point, that was all Yvonne could do to appease her mother.
The look Freda tossed her way was a mixture of skepticism and exasperation. “Mm-hmm,” Freda murmured, and then turned away from Yvonne. She lifted her left hand slowly, extending her arm across the table until her fingers tentatively touched the glass of fruit punch Yvonne had brought out with the plate of spaghetti.
Yvonne sat up straighter in her chair and started to reach over and assist her mother, but then she thought better of the idea. Freda didn’t like feeling helpless; she despised the fact that her body—and the good Lord, because she was certain this was all His fault—had betrayed her. The aneurysm that had led to the stroke and her subsequent collapse in front of the entire usher board at Mt. Moriah Century Baptist Church was a curse He’d wrongfully inflicted on her. After all, she’d done everything she was supposed to in life and exceeded at each turn. She didn’t deserve to have fallen like this. Yvonne had watched that anger and bitterness fester in her mother for the last twenty-six months, and itweighed on her shoulders as heavily as the responsibility to take care of the woman she’d once admired.
Freda’s fingers eventually wrapped around the glass, but there were still a few moments of pause before Yvonne watched the glass slowly lift from the table. Her mother was right-handed, and that was the side of her body the stroke had attacked, leaving the right half of Freda’s face slackened and the limbs on that side less than cooperative on any given day.
