Read Online Confessions by Ryne Douglas Pearson - Free Book Online

“You can tell me more.”
    She ignores me. If she hears me at all. I do not know what her mind segments. How selective it might be. Just as it stops her telling of Katie’s life before it nears that point where no more memories can have existed, perhaps it lets her hear only what it chooses. Perhaps it filters randomly. No rhyme, no reason, just what she is. Because.
    If there are moments in my life where I question the random motives of my Maker, it is as I witness my mother’s flailing disconnect from all that surrounds her.
    “He’ll be home and I always have the door open for him,” she explains, still thumping the wood around the locks. “Gus always expects me to be waiting for him.”
    “I’m here, honey.” The voice comes from behind. My mother and I turn in unison and see my father, just inside the dining room, his smile thin but true. She calms instantly at the sight of him and moves away from the door, going to my father with a brightness building about her.
    “You snuck in again,” she scolds him mildly, and lets the camera dangle from one hand as she embraces him, her cheek pressed to his.
    My father holds her, looking past to me. A tired stoicism fills his gaze. He is ready for this all to be over, but at the same time unable to fathom such a thing.
    “Let’s get you upstairs for a rest,” he says.
    “You’re so good to me,” my mother tells him. He closes his eyes and holds her more tightly than the moment before.
    *  *  *
    My father walks me out to my car, keying one of the deadbolts as we leave the house, my mother ‘resting’ in her their room upstairs. Settled into a soft wingback facing the window overlooking the backyard. The camera might be on her lap, or not. Upstairs is a place she appears to feel more settled. More safe. The old Nikon, which can certainly be branded a security blanket of sorts, likely serves little purpose there. She will sit quietly until my father joins her to make of the day what he can.
    “I put the back seat down,” my father explains as we approach the car. “Wedged it through the pass through from the trunk.”
    The storm door fills the back seat at an angle, half of it lost in the depths of the trunk. I take the keys from my pocket and look to my father.
    “A few screws and it’s on,” he tells me. He would prefer to do the deed himself, I know. But he has not been to the house on Arrow Lake in five years, and will, I imagine, never venture there again. It is a three hour drive up, and three back, and added to any time he might spend there the sum is far more than he is willing to be away from my mother. And so the modest house has become little more than the occasional spot where I retreat from the ever-present responsibilities of my parish. My job. My calling.
    “Not a problem,” I assure him.
    “If the weather gets in…” he says, stopping there, leaving the consequences unspoken as a slackened expression of despair rises. “Your mother couldn’t recognize me this morning.” If there is a reality which would be more painful for him to voice, I cannot imagine it. He turns to me, makes a slight gesture that seems a nod of acceptance. An understanding that this milestone was never a possibility—it was a certainty. “She seemed better later.”
    There is nothing I can say. Nothing I can do. My mother is the victim of this affliction, but my father is the primary recipient of its pain. She has forgotten me. Forgotten that I am her son. I am just the priest who visits from time to time. My father has been her one bond, however tenuous, to a life that once was. And now that is slipping.
    “Thanks for loading the door, pop.” I reach to open the driver’s door but am stopped by his words. “Are you okay?”
    The fabric of his life torn in places I cannot even imagine, his concern is for me. His query the same as Chris’s a few hours before. I do not feel the same person I was at the same hour yesterday, this inner change which has befallen