It was a business trip, four days, a series of meetings in Seattle that I could not reschedule because they involved external clients and a timeline that had been set before my mother’s diagnosis and that could not be moved without significant professional consequence.
I arranged everything before I left.
I wrote out the medication schedule on a laminated card.
I put it on the refrigerator.
I also put it on the small table in the guest room.
I put the dates and times of the upcoming chemo appointments on the calendar on the refrigerator and also texted them to Gabriel.
I stocked the refrigerator with the foods my mother could keep down, which after three weeks of chemo I understood well, the specific small foods that were not repulsive to a system that found most things repulsive.
Plain crackers.
Ginger tea.
Rice.
Broth.
Applesauce.
I made a pot of rice before I left.
I showed Gabriel where the ginger tea was.
I said: she needs to take the anti-nausea medication at eight in the morning and eight in the evening.
He said: I know.
I said: the card is on the refrigerator.
He said: I know, Sara.
I said: she might not ask for help. She won’t ask for help. You need to check on her.
He said: I’ll check on her.
I said: Gabriel.
He said: Sara. I’ve got it.
I said: call me if anything changes.
He said: nothing is going to change. Go to your meetings.
I went to my meetings.
The meetings were in Seattle and they were the specific kind of meetings that required full attention, the kind where you could not be somewhere else mentally, where the clients were paying for your presence and the presence had to be actual rather than performed.
I was present.
I texted my mother every evening.
She texted back in the brief way of someone who found texting effortful but who understood it as a form of care.
She texted: fine. Eating a little.
She texted: slept okay.
She texted: took the medication.
The texts were reassuring.
On the fourth day, the morning meeting ended at noon instead of four.
The client had another obligation.
My flight was booked for that evening.
I changed it.
I got on an earlier flight.
I did not tell Gabriel I was coming home early.
I intended to call him from the car.
I landed at seven in the evening.
I drove home.
I was thinking about my mother and about whether I should make the ginger tea and whether there was enough broth.
I pulled into the driveway.
I noticed a second car that I recognized as belonging to Gabriel’s brother Danny.
I thought: oh. Danny came over.
I did not think anything else yet.
I came in through the garage.
The kitchen was the first thing.
The kitchen was not the kitchen I had left.
There were bottles on the counter.
Beer bottles, the empty kind, the kind that have been there long enough to suggest they were from earlier and not from right now.
There was a bag of chips that had been opened and most of its contents consumed.
There was a pizza box.
The pizza box was open and contained the remains of a pizza that had been eaten over its surface, crust pieces and grease pooling in the cardboard.
The carpet in the hallway had a stain.
Not a new stain, the kind that had been there for a few days and not been addressed.
I put my bag down.
The sound from the guest room was the television.
I stood in the hallway.
I heard football.
I heard Gabriel’s voice and Danny’s voice in the easy way of two men who have been in a comfortable place for a while.
I opened the door to the guest room.
The guest room.
The room with the window that looked onto the backyard.
The room across from the bathroom.
The room I had told my mother was her room.
Gabriel was on the bed.
Danny was on the chair that I had moved in so my mother could sit by the window.
They had the television.
