2 • Jessica George

It’s a small, functional area with a gas stove (in desperate need of cleaning, but I assign that task to tomorrow evening), an oven with a missing grill
door, a tall fridge, a smaller freezer filled with various unidentified let-me-notwaste-this food pieces (sorting through assigned to Saturday afternoon) and
a washing machine that dances out from under the countertop when it’s on,
but when empty is just light enough to push back with the weight of my body.
Said countertops are a white-speckled dark gray with a dull sheen I think is
meant to trick you into believing it’s marble.
I take a container of lunch from the batch I made on Sunday for myself,
then cook pasta for Dad’s lunch and leave it covered in the microwave. The
rice I make for his dinner goes on a shelf in the cold oven. I cut up oranges
for both our snacks—Should I save the strawberries for tomorrow? I tap my nails
on the kitchen counter, considering the expiry date. Nah, go for it—and leave
Dad’s in a covered bowl, packing mine into another container.
None of my friends know it’s when I’m out of the shower that I hear
Dad’s carer, Dawoud, come in. Today he’s on the phone, likely to his wife in
Yemen where he’s from—he told me about her once. She’s supposedly very
beautiful.
Dawoud is a bit of a giant, well over six feet and only a little round in
the middle, with gray hair on his head and several strands escaping from his
ears. A smoker in his sixties, he has a loud but hoarse voice. My dad’s fiftyseven, has never smoked, and stopped drinking years ago. Age is a terrifyingly
inconsistent beast.
I cream my skin and pull out my Tuesday dress, navy, short-sleeved, loosefitting, and below my knees, because no one in the office wears jeans. I tune
in to a prayer channel Mum likes to randomly quiz me on, whilst pulling on
black tights and inserting two gold studs that were passed down to me into
my ears. I set a reminder to call Dr. Appong, my dad’s GP for the last three
years, at lunch for Dad’s swollen feet, and look through my emails to find that
we don’t qualify for a council tax reduction.
Downstairs, Dawoud is in the kitchen making toast, and tomorrow will be
porridge because the two meals alternate on weekdays. I walk into the living
room and tell Dad, “I’ll make you pancakes on Saturday.”
“Oh, goody,” he says smiling, but he won’t remember the pancakes until I
feed them to him on Saturday morning. That’s how his Parkinson’s works. He
can remember constant, repetitive things, like mine and Dawoud’s presence, but short-term details won’t sit in his brain for very long. They literally go
through one ear, settle long enough for him to reply, then go out the other.
Some days his medication will assist, but other days I think the meds are too
busy tackling his swollen joints or his shaking hands, his high-blood pressure
or his difficulty speaking, to lend a hand.
I have a picture of my parents taken in September 1984 and in it Dad
is tall and handsome with an Afro and a silver chunky bracelet he still wears
to this day. Whenever I look at that photo, I think of my last day at college,
eight years ago. My year were having a party thrown in a bar, our equivalent
of a prom, I guess. I didn’t end up going even though I was asked. By
Connor . . . no, Charlie, the quiet guy in my maths class that I had no idea
even liked me. I did say yes; I bought a dress, but then I had to cancel on the
day. Poor Charlie. An hour before I texted him to say I couldn’t make it, my
dad received his diagnosis: Parkinson’s disease.
We’d all been quick to blame the aging process for his “clumsiness” or
short-term memory. I mean, we’ve all put our keys down and then declared
them missing two minutes later, so who were we to judge? But then one evening, Dad got lost.
I was back from school and the only one at home when he called the
landline.