Neither of us reached for them.
“The truth is, Addy,” he continued when she left, “I met with a doctor when I got here, someone recommended by Jillie. And, well….” He sighed, and it sounded like resignation. “I’m not getting any younger.”
“I could say that about basically everyone, Pops,” I said quietly.
The joke fell flat. Instead of trying to revive it, I learned my lesson and stayed quiet, but it wasn’t too long before Pops laid it all out for me.
In the simplest terms possible, he told me about the tremors that came and went. The extra stiffness in his muscles.
I knew those things. Had been quietly tracking them.
What I hadn’t known about was the patches of time he lost, or how frequently. Or how his dad had succumbed to dementia, hiding his symptoms until he almost set their house on fire.
The doctor he’d seen had confirmed it was Parkinson’s disease, he told me, his hands hidden beneath the table. He looked down at them when he mentioned the potential complications that came with it as well as the monitoring and early interventions that were available at somewhere like Live Oak—specifically, the memory-care facility called Zinnia House, where specialists were on hand.
“No, Addy,” he said sternly when I asked about him moving in with me.
That brief daydream I’d sunk into when he said Parkinson’s, of driving us back to his A-frame cabin and managing his sickness myself?
Out the window. Merely a whim lost to the coastal wind.
He spoke matter-of-factly through it all, answering my questions between small, shaky bites of food, as if he could force this to all be normal. My gaze naturally strayed to his hands repeatedly, cataloging every tremor.
When he caught me looking, he raised a bushy, grey eyebrow at me, and I got the message.
I picked up a hushpuppy and ate, joining in on his delusion of normalcy.
But I’d seen what undiagnosed diseases like this could spiral into, and how quickly. The medic in me was full of pride for the proactive way Pops was safeguarding himself, but the other part of me? The unhealthy, unloved little boy who wanted to cling to his leg during storms but pointedly stood tall to prove that he wasn’t afraid? The one who trudged through miles of woods to the cabinafter particularly bad days of bullying at school or at home or both?
That boy was devastated.
That boy would have clung.
But when Pops started talking about his happy memories here at the beach with Grams and his eyes glistened, I shoved that boy into the sand.
He could make me selfish, and there wasn’t room for that here.
“She loved this place,” he said thickly. “The beach, the Gulf. I want to live this out for her however much I can.”
My throat constricted at the emotion in his voice. He didn’t seem sick to me at all, but how many times had I heard the same thing from family during emergency calls as they watched us wheel their loved ones into the ambulance?
Having reached the end of what he needed to say, Pops wiped his hands on his napkin, dropped it on top of his plate, and pushed it away.
I gazed out the open doorway of the restaurant to the rolling waves of the Gulf beyond it.
“Live Oak seems nice,” I finally offered. “From what I saw.”
“It is,” he said. “There are some characters there for sure.”
“Surely that lady was the exception to the residents there, not the rule?”
He grunted. “I don’t know. She asked me if I was ‘of the lifestyle.’ Any idea what that means?”
I choked on my sip of water, setting my plastic cup down hard right as the server appeared with the check.
Pops fished some bills out of his wallet and ignored my protests as he paid. He’d never let me pay for a thing in my life—not even now when I had more than enough.
“No change. Thanks, darlin’.”
