I tracked all of it. Not because I expected to be compensated. I tracked it because I am a bookkeeper by training and habit, and because somewhere in my brain the part that manages records was always running, even when I couldn’t see a reason for it.
Daniel visited twice a year by this point. He was helpful when he came. I don’t want to pretend otherwise. He’d take Mom to her Thursday appointment so I could take a full day off. He’d do the yard work he’d been trained to do by his own business and do it well. He’d sit with her in the evenings and watch her shows with her and that gave me three or four evenings in a row where I could leave the house at a human hour and go see Maya and pretend, briefly, that I had a life.
But there were things that only came up when he wasn’t there, because most things only came up when he wasn’t there.
One night in January, year six, I was asleep at one-thirty in the morning when I heard my mother fall. I got to her room in under a minute. She’d tried to get up without using the rail I’d added to her bed and she’d lost her balance and gone down sideways. She was more startled than hurt, but for fifteen minutes we didn’t know which. I sat on the floor with her, keeping her still while I assessed, and she kept saying, “I didn’t want to wake you.” She said that four times. She hadn’t wanted to wake me.