“Yeah,” he said, after a moment. “Yeah, I probably can.”
## The Apartment Search
Three weeks before the closing date, I drove my parents to look at apartments. It was a Saturday, overcast, and my mother was wearing the expression she wears when she is doing something she has accepted but not endorsed. My father was more open — he had grown up renting, had rented through his twenties, had a practical relationship with the concept that my mother, who had owned a house since she was thirty-one, did not.
The first apartment we looked at was a two-bedroom on the third floor with a galley kitchen and a view of the parking lot. My mother didn’t say anything negative about it. She also didn’t say anything positive. She walked through each room at the pace of someone measuring distances in their mind.
The second was a first-floor unit in a small complex with a courtyard. Slightly older construction, but the rooms were a good size and the kitchen had been updated. My father stood in the kitchen for a while, opening cabinets.
“What do you think?” I asked him.
“It’s fine,” he said. “It’s a good size.”
The third was in the over-fifty-five community thirty minutes away. I had almost not included it because it felt like it was further than they’d want, but I’d put it on the list because the price was right and the amenities — a small gym, a community room, organized activities — seemed like things my father might actually use.