Another time, he yelled at Owen’s mother because she had parked too close to the curb.
At our engagement party, he drank too much and spent part of the evening angrily arguing about politics with nobody in particular.
Afterward, Owen drove home in silence.
Finally he said,
“He wasn’t always this bad.”
I looked at him.
“No?”
His hands tightened around the steering wheel.
“No.”
A pause.
“He used to be worse.”
Four years ago, Owen’s mother died suddenly after a stroke.
For a while, Frank managed on his own.
Then he started forgetting things.
Keys.
Meals.
Appointments.
Eventually, the problems became more serious.
One night he called Owen at three in the morning asking why his wife hadn’t returned from the store.
Another time he left the stove on.
Then he got lost driving to a grocery store he had visited for thirty years.
A stranger found him sitting in a gas-station parking lot, confused and terrified.
The diagnosis was dementia.
It progressed quickly.
Lisa lived across the country and said she couldn’t take him.
She had children.
A demanding job.
A long list of reasons.
So Frank moved in with us.
Our office became his bedroom.
We installed alarms on the doors.
We locked away certain kitchen items.
We hid the car keys.
Some days he was almost the Frank Owen remembered.
He watched old westerns and complained that television had gone downhill.
Other days he wandered through the house asking where his wife was.
Sometimes fear turned into anger.
Once he knocked a coffee mug against the wall during a confused moment.
And every time his voice rose, Owen changed.
His whole body became still.
His thumb rubbed against his finger.
“Dad,” he would say quietly.
“You’re safe. It’s okay.”
He spoke to Frank as though he were trying to calm both the man standing in front of him and the frightened child Owen himself had once been.
By September, Owen and I hadn’t gone anywhere alone together in seven months.
Not dinner.
Not shopping.
Not even a short walk.
We tried.
In February, Lisa promised to visit so we could go to an Italian restaurant.
She canceled the day before.
In April, our neighbor offered to stay with Frank while we attended a concert.
That afternoon, Frank became frightened because he didn’t recognize her.
We stayed home.
In June, we hired a caregiver so we could spend an afternoon at the beach.
We barely reached the parking lot before the caregiver called.
Frank had locked himself in the bathroom and refused to come out.
After that, we mostly stopped trying.
One night in bed, I asked Owen,
“If you could do one completely normal thing right now, what would it be?”
He thought about it.
“Go to a movie.”
“That’s all?”
“Sit in the dark. Eat overpriced popcorn. Forget everything for two hours.”
“What movie?”
For the first time in days, he smiled.
“The new Spider-Man.”
I laughed.
“You’re thirty-eight.”
“I’ve seen every one since I was a kid.”
Then his smile faded slightly.
“My dad used to take me.”
I stayed quiet.
“It was the one place we could go where he didn’t yell,” Owen said. “You can’t yell through a movie without everybody noticing.”
He looked away.
“I always felt safe there.”
I reached for his hand.
“Then we’re going.”
It took almost three weeks to arrange.
I found a caregiver through an agency named Mrs. Pham.
She had spent twenty years working in memory care.
She came to our house twice before the movie just so Frank could get used to her.
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