C Hribal - The Company Car

In the lower part of the field, rising out of the scrub trees and marsh grass so pale it looks translucent, Ike’s tepee eerily appears like a ghost from another century. It’s the real thing, this tepee. Ike cut and trimmed the twenty-foot poles himself, cut and stitched the sailcloth, learned how to lash the poles, how to wrap the cloth so there’s a smoke hole, and how to tie in a drip ring so the tepee stays dry even in a downpour. Deer ribs worked through slits in the overlap hold shut the entrance. Even though frost is settling, inside it’s toasty. You can see the smoke rising from inside, hear the hum of the gas burner.

If there’s a protocol for knocking on a tepee, no one’s informed me what it is, so I just lift the flap and scoot inside.

“Speak of the devil,” shouts Ernie. “Welcome aboard.” He waggles his beer bottle. If he hurt himself falling off the roof, he’s since self-medicated to where pain has no hold on him. “May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead.”

I don’t bother pointing out the contradiction. I sit down on a pile of woolen blankets. Underneath are straw and pine boughs. Ike says four couples could sleep here comfortably, though it’s usually just him, Sam, and their children. Wally Jr. is sitting on “the couch”—two bales of straw covered by a tarp and a horse blanket. Meg and Ernie are next to me, Robert Aaron is across the way, sharing a bearskin rug with Ike. Between us a good-size fire blazes in a fire ring dug six inches deep and banked with granite rocks. Off to one side is the space heater, set on low. Everyone’s face is a soft yellow-orange.

“Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” sings out Ernie.

“No Cinderella,” says Meg.

“No, no Cinderella,” says Wally Jr. “We’ve established that. Next topic.”

“I just hope it’s going to be a nice day tomorrow,” Ernie says, fishing in the cooler for another beer. “They’ll cancel the balloon ride if the weather’s not perfect, right?” He looks at me. I was the one who set up the balloon ride, contacting an outfit that would be willing to go up this early in the year, when the winds are unpredictable if not downright freakish.

“We’re not going to decide anything tonight, are we?” I say. “I mean, if I just ask point-blank, ‘What’s going to happen with Mom and Dad the next couple of years?’ nobody has an answer, right?”

Wally Jr. says, “Well, for starters, they could keel over tomorrow. I suppose then all our problems are solved.”

Meg says, “Or they could live twenty more years, the last eighteen of them in Depends.”

“Ish, man, I don’t want to think about that.”

“Who does, Ernie? But it’s possible. And then what? Who’s going to take care of Mom and Dad in their old age? You?”

“Maybe they’ve got a plan,” Ernie says. “Maybe they’ve got it all worked out.”

“This is Mom and Dad we’re talking about,” Meg says. “Their idea of a plan is a wish and a promise and a hope for the best.”

“Dad believes in planning.”

“Dad believes in miracles. And thinking about this stuff just makes Mom sad.”

“It makes me sad, too,” says Ernie.

“But that’s not a reason not to think about it!” shouts Meg. “You want to wait till this problem comes up and bites you on the ass?”

“Whoa, whoa, what got into you?” Wally Jr. says. “Do we need to take some of Ernie’s beer and shovel it down you?”

“No,” Meg says very evenly, gritting her teeth, “we need to think about Mom and Dad. Because if we don’t have anything worked out, and they don’t have anything worked out, then we’re going to have this same meeting in a few years, only with a much greater sense of urgency, and I will tell you all something now—I am not going to be the default and fallback position for all of you once you’ve decided Mom and Dad are too much to handle.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” says Wally Jr. “Let’s start at the beginning.”

“The beginning?” Meg says. “What beginning? We’re talking about an ending here.”

And indeed we are. Which is why we are having trouble talking about it. Meg lays it out for us, what we are looking at, what anyone with parents in their declining years is looking at: independent living with some in-home care, be it in-home aides or visiting nurses, or something more along the line of assisted-living facilities, such as condominiums for the elderly, or group homes, or further down the road, nursing homes or hospices. Depending on our parents’ health and finances, our finances, and what kind (if any) of estate planning our parents have done or are willing to do, we are looking at a whole host of possibilities and permutations.

“The real question here,” Meg says, “is what kind of care would be best for them.”

Everyone is silent. We know what kind of care would be best for them. We grew up with that kind of care. We grew up with Nomi. With Artu, too, though there was always the pretext that he kept up his own apartment. Our mother cared for Nomi until she died. And after Nomi died, Artu moved to his own apartment in a town five miles away and “dropped by” four or five nights a week until he, too, passed away. And when Grandma and Grandpa Cza-Cza’s minds and bodies failed them, they, too, moved in with our parents. They’d never liked our mother, had worked actively against our father marrying that smoldering sexpot of a woman, but when dementia and heart attacks felled them, they were living with our parents, which is to say they were living with our mother since our father was away 80 percent of the time. Our mother, making sure they took their pills and got dressed in the morning and undressed at night. Making sure they bathed regularly, and when they couldn’t manage that, bathing them herself. Combing their hair and shaving them. Feeding them, wiping their chins, changing their sheets, washing them up after their accidents, rolling them to one side of the bed and scrubbing the shit out of the mattress. “You don’t know what it’s like,” our mother said to us, “lifting up an eighty-nine-year-old man’s scrotum to clean beneath his testicles after he’s soiled himself. And he’s telling you not to touch him, he likes the smell of fresh bread in the morning.”

“So,” says Meg, looking from one of us to the next, pleased she’s finally raised the Big Topic. “Who wants to volunteer? How shall we handle this? Who takes them first? Do we cast lots? Take turns—yearlong residencies with Mom and Dad—or do we pony up and pay one of us to take on sole responsibility? Or… or what, exactly?”

Ernie says, “I always kind of thought Mom and Dad would stay right here.”

My thoughts exactly, but Meg is on to that like white on rice. “That’s a lovely thought, Ernie, and I’d like to think so, too. But it still begs the question, who’s going to look after them? Are you going to move here from Eau Claire? Is Emcee going to move here from Milwaukee? Robert Aaron from Racine?”

Wally Jr. says, “Claire and me live right up the hill.”

“So you’re volunteering?”

“No, I’m just saying Claire and me live right up the hill. We could look in on them.”

“Lovely. And what happens when ‘looking in on them’ isn’t enough? Are you ready to be the full-time caretaker? Do we hire a nurse? Move them to foster care? A nursing home? We’re talking fifty, sixty thousand dollars a year for that. I checked. And the level of care—you know this, don’t you?—varies from decent to despicable. You want round-the-clock care? Round-the-clock care my ass. In some of those places you’re lucky if they turn you over every couple of hours so you don’t get bedsores. ‘Hey, Mom, how’s it going?’ ‘Oh, fine, honey, no bedsores this week.’ How’s that for quality of life? Even a group home or assisted-living facility is going to cost twenty to forty thousand, depending on the situation. Heartland Home for the Elders—that’s right here in town—runs thirty-eight thousand a pop. And who, exactly, is going to pay for that? What, we sell the farm? Chop up their assets, make them look poor? Then they’ll qualify for Medicaid, and get warehoused with the rest of the dead and the dying?”