I called the memory-care unit Monday morning and asked if my mother had been asking about anybody in particular. The woman at the desk said she had, almost every Wednesday, and that there was a man who signed in under a name they couldn’t quite make out because he always asked to see her privately. I asked what he looked like, and she said she couldn’t give me much, except that he’d been coming for nearly two years and always brought the same little paper bag. Then she said something that made me sit down in my kitchen. My mother hadn’t been paying for the visits. Someone else had been paying the bill, and the account was in my husband’s name.
I confronted him that night and asked why he was paying for my mother’s care without telling me. He said it wasn’t what I thought and that he’d only been helping with something she’d asked him to keep private. I asked what she could possibly have asked him to keep private from her own daughter, and he wouldn’t answer. Then I showed him the notification I’d seen on the iPad and asked who the woman was. He stared at it for a long time before saying she was someone my mother knew years ago. I asked why a woman he’d never mentioned was discussing my mother’s appointments with him, and he finally said, “Because she knows what your mother did.”
The next morning I went through the box of papers I’d brought home when my mother moved into memory care. At the bottom was an envelope with my husband’s handwriting on it, dated two years before I ever knew there was a problem. Inside was a photocopy of a hospital record from 2003, and my mother’s name was listed as the person who had provided the information. I read it three times because the patient wasn’t my mother, and it wasn’t me. It was a woman whose name I recognized from the smartwatch notifications — and beside her name was a note saying that my husband had been the emergency contact for her daughter since birth, and that daughter is…
