In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

119 Eilean Donan The Jig Is Pretty Much Up As arranged, I fly into Tampa around five in the evening, and all I can think about is grabbing a cocktail with my two brothers who have been directing the movers all day at drops #1, #2, and #3. We get so few opportunities to be together without the kids, or, in recent months, without Dad. We end up, of course, having more than one cocktail in Joe’s Florida room—a porch with glass louver blinds. What the heck. All we have to do is unpack boxes at the assisted-living apartment and move furniture around. A few drinks won’t hurt. Plus, we have Dad’s detailed “blueprints ,” which are folded up in my back pocket. Joe calls out in his best imitation of Dad’s voice as he heads to the bathroom, “I want my wrought iron couch, Pam.” We drive to Eilean Donan, the assisted-living place, at around seven. It’s only a few blocks from Joe’s house, and on the way over in the car, we’re trying to find something on the radio to fit the mood. We are anxious . We hope we are all making the right decision. “Just turn it off,” Joe says from the backseat. My cell phone rings, and it’s Barb and she’s crying. I turn down the radio and put the cell on speaker. Part 6 120 | Lucky That Way She is saying something about not selling the house. “I’m sitting here with Dad all alone in an empty house,” she tells us. “I’m in the garage, so he can’t hear me.” She’s in a panic because she has more of an attachment to the house than do the rest of us, I suppose. She lived the closest to Dad—about a three-hour drive away—and spent the most time there. It was funny—in the later years, she would actually go there when he was gone for the weekend. She would just call him up: “You going to Joan’s?” He would say yes. And she would tell him she’d be at his house. A mutual arrangement . She had her own key. She rarely actually saw him. “Ask him,” I tell her. “Ask him if we can keep the house. See what he says.” “I can’t do that,” she says. “He’ll say no.” It’s his house, his decision. He told us long ago in various letters that we should sell the house after he died. Keeping it, he said, would only cause fighting among the siblings. Maybe that’s what he’s thinking now. Barb, obviously, would use it as a vacation home far more than the rest of us. What he has told us is that he needs the money. Assisted living will cost about sixty thousand dollars a year. And the thing is, no one knows how long he’ll be around. Might be ten years. Might be an hour. “We’ll see you tomorrow,” I tell her. “Hang in there.” At the end of a long corridor, we find room 227, a moderately sized apartment filled with Dad’s boxes and furniture. I like the apartment immediately . It’s a corner apartment, very private, with good outdoor light coming in. And the screened balcony is surrounded by the flat, waxy leaves of tall magnolia trees planted in the lawn below. I can hear exotic Florida birds singing. It’s nice. He’ll be happy here, I think. “Well,” I tell my brothers after they help me move the large pieces of furniture into place, “pick me up in a few hours.” It’s technically my job to get the apartment in shape. John and Joe have had a long day of organizing and unloading as the movers twelve hours earlier arrived and made the three drops. The work goes quickly, even though I’m alone. Not so bad. I arrange art books nicely on the shelves, screw together the easel and place it in the sunlight in the corner by the balcony. I shove the dresser adjacent to the hospital bed in the bedroom. I find a hammer and nails and hang up Grandpa’s red-white-blue clock and a few woodblock prints Dad made in the 1970s. I arrange his black metal sculptures—a series of twelveinch -tall human figures—on top of the file cabinet. I plug in the lamps...

Share