Penpal by Auerbach Dathan

Author:Auerbach, Dathan [Auerbach, Dathan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: 1000Vultures
Published: 2012-08-11T16:00:00+00:00

I know now that Mrs. Maggie had Alzheimer’s disease. Her husband Tom really had been a pilot. He flew a commercial jetliner all over the eastern United States, and this caused him to spend a great deal of time away from home. After he retired, he and Mrs. Maggie kept mostly to themselves, but every time my mom would run into one or both of them, the conversation would inevitably focus on the trips they wanted to take – if they could only find the time. Tom had discounts with the airline he had retired from, but as is so often the case, their plans were always for “someday,” and that day kept getting moved further down the line.

On the evening of July 4, years before I was born, Tom came to my mom’s house. He was distressed, though he tried to conceal it as he casually asked my mother if she had seen Maggie. He said that she had gone out for some chicken so that he could grill it for the holiday, but that had been almost six hours ago. My mom hadn’t seen her, but said she would contact Tom immediately if she saw her or heard anything.

The police brought Mrs. Maggie home about five hours after that. She had wandered from the grocery store and walked to an apartment that she and Tom had shared thirty years before when Tom was just starting his job at the airline. When the police arrived at the apartment, Mrs. Maggie insisted that she lived there with her husband, but when they read aloud the address that was printed on her driver’s license, she regained her clarity and covered her embarrassment with nervous laughter.

She wasn’t hurt when the police brought her home, but Tom was destroyed. He would tell my mom some time later that he had known for a long while that something was wrong with Maggie, but he had hoped that she would just get better somehow.

A few days after the police brought his wife home, Tom told my mother that he was planning on taking his wife to Rome – it had been a dream of hers since she was a young girl. Maggie had a collection of books about Rome and Italy at large that were all dog-eared on the pages with the places that she wanted to see. He said that pushing it back was simply not an option anymore; the doctors had told him that the windows of her lucidity would likely grow smaller as time pressed on. Tom began to cry and stammer as he touched his own head and said that he needed to take her now, while she was still here. He wanted her to be there, in the place of her dreams, while she still had a chance of knowing where she was.

He wanted her to remember.

They were old now, but he thought that they might still do some hiking, and to prepare, he began to exercise by walking around the neighborhood with Maggie.

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