His sister signs the papers

I close at two. Have done since the fall of 2024. There's a card in the window, laminated, seven to two, and guys still pull in at three-thirty and sit out there with the engine going like the card's a suggestion. Mike stays till five most days and does the paperwork. Abdul's the best alignment guy on that stretch of Warren but he won't lock up on his own, so anything after two is Mike or it's nothing. We're off about a third. I haven't taken the books past June to the accountant.

My father opened that shop in 1974. Four bays. Still four bays.

August ninth, Ray was on the bathroom floor between the toilet and the tub, on his side, and he wasn't hurt. People hear it and they picture him falling and breaking something. He didn't fall. He sat down and then he was down and he couldn't work out the order of things to get his legs under him. That's all it was.

I put the grab bars in myself in 2023, one at the toilet and one in the shower, into the studs, not the suction cup kind they sell at Meijer. He was underneath the bars. I got down on my knees, which takes me a minute these days, and got his arm around my neck, and I moved him maybe eight inches toward the door. That was everything I had. I was two-forty at fifty. I'm three-nineteen now. Sat on the lid of the toilet after that with my hand flat on his chest and the tap still running, and he talked the whole time about a Skylark, which is not a car we've ever had.

Called it in at ten-fifteen. Two kids came, EMTs, and they had him standing in about six seconds with a strap thing that's got handles sewn into it. Sixty-one dollars on the internet. I ordered one that night sitting on the floor in there.

Their system has Kathy down as his person. That's from 2019 and it's correct paperwork, there's nothing wrong with it. She's his sister. Somebody called her out in Sylvania at eleven-something and she was standing at Oakwood before one in the morning with a legal pad, asking the nurse about his sodium. She hugged me in the hallway by the vending machines. She said thank God you were home.

I drove him to the lawyer's for that back in 2019, up Telegraph, building with a dentist on the first floor. Waited in the car. Got a coffee and came back and waited some more. He came down and got in and said it was done and we stopped at Kroger on the way home because we needed dog food. The dog's been dead since 2022.

He came in for rear rotors on a Buick in June of 2003, a LeSabre, his mother's car. Came back the next week for the fronts, which didn't need doing. He stayed over that August and after that he mostly didn't go home. The house is mine. My father's money put me in it and it's my name on it by itself. Ray paid the gas bill every month and he bought the food.

Samir's wife says your friend. She's been saying it since about 2004. She's never said it in front of him. My mother, God rest her, called him habibi. To me he was your friend. At my father's funeral he stood at the back near the coats and carried trays in and out and nobody stopped him.

Diagnosis came three years ago, at sixty-one, which they kept telling me is young for it. Donepezil at eight in the morning. Memantine at eight and eight. There's a little white one at bedtime for the evenings when he gets going, and I break it in half, because the whole one puts him under till noon the next day. The box is Sunday through Saturday with two rows, and I fill it at the kitchen table on Sunday nights with the game on.

Bad days he calls me Nabil. I answer to it. It's not worth the ten minutes it takes to walk him back from it, and he gets frightened somewhere in the middle of the walking back, so I answer to it and we carry on with whatever we were doing.

The place is off Central in Toledo. Memory care wing, so the doors take a code. There's a courtyard out back with a loop you can walk and raised beds they let them plant. Sixty-eight minutes from my driveway if I take 75 and don't stop. Seventy-five if there's anything sitting at the bridge. I've driven it four times now. Kathy's twelve minutes from the front door.

He goes November eleventh.

I called the desk there myself on a Tuesday afternoon and asked what the visiting is. The woman said the memory care wing is family, and anybody the responsible party designates. I wrote designates on the back of a work order and it's still on the desk under the stapler.

So I asked Kathy. She said Fouad, come whenever you want, you know that. She said it warm and she meant it. She was in my kitchen when she said it. She's been in my kitchen maybe nine times in twenty-two years and she's never asked me a single thing.

She brought the intake packet over on the thirtieth. Sat at my table and went through the transfer-of-care sheet, and she asked me the hours on the pills because I'm the one who knows the hours, and she put them down in her own handwriting. Then the bottom of every page. She used the pen out of my kitchen drawer, the one with the shop's name down the side of it.

Guys ask about the hours. I tell them the truth, which is that I've got somebody at home, and they say oh, your mother? and I say no, and then it's quiet for a second, and then I say I can get you in Thursday at seven. Mrs. Haddad's been coming to us since my father and she goes to a place in Allen Park for her oil now because two o'clock doesn't work for her. That's fine. She's seventy-nine, she's not going to sit in a waiting room till the end of time for me.

Mike asked me last week if the hours are going back to normal. I told him I'd let him know.

What I've got at the house is the lift chair. Ordered it the week after the bathroom, three hundred and eighty dollars, wall-hugger so it clears the radiator, and it was backordered and it comes Tuesday. Thirty days to send it back. I've read that part twice.

It goes in the front room where the recliner is. I'll get the recliner down the basement Sunday.