10:30

I wake at 3am.

It is the hour I always imagine I could keep — if I could just stay awake until morning. I think about coffee at sunrise, the quiet house, going out to paint before anyone needs anything from me.

But I won’t.

I already know the day will be full.

My mind wakes before my body and begins moving through the list: calls, planning, checking, arranging. A few hours with my dad, but the rest of the day arranged around it. It is never just the hours I am there. It is the managing before and the thinking after.

Lately I notice something I don’t like.

I am less present with the people I love.

I answer, I listen, I encourage — but part of me is somewhere else, scanning ahead, solving problems that haven’t happened yet. I feel myself retreating while still sitting in the room.

I love my family. I want to be available to them. Instead I feel like I am waiting for the next thing to go wrong.

There are no days off from it.

The phone, the texts, the small decisions that matter too much.

I am holding two states of mind at once — my life, and his.

⸻

Two days later my husband leaves after we attempt to jump his dead battery — and the house goes quiet.

My dad stands in the middle of the room trembling.

I sit him down and begin talking, orienting him gently so the anxiety has somewhere to land. It works. We talk about electricity and batteries — subjects he once knew well enough that people asked him to wire their homes.

He was a builder.

Sometimes he still is.

He explains how wiring runs through a frame, how the wires are folded and stapled into place. I can see it as he describes it. His voice steadies while he talks.

The dog jumps into my lap, then jumps down to check on him, then returns and presses his whole body against me. We laugh.

His anxiety settles.

⸻

Later he texts me:

Trash on right side of driveway?

I tell him yes, but not today.

Trash goes out Tuesday for Wednesday pickup. It is Saturday.

I picture the sticky notes about the trash day pickup all over his house. Each one trying to hold time in place.

He is relieved he checked. He already put the trash out. He brings the trash back in.

Then another message:

Please keep an eye on me. I’m forgetting days and dates.

I call him.

He answers, “This is Mars.”

I say, “Copy, Roger that. Earth to Mars.”

We laugh the way people laugh when there is no other way through something hard.

He asks why AAA is coming. Why his car won’t start. Why he called them.

Because the battery is dead.

Because the car won’t start.

Because the man who used to solve my car problems is now trying to make sense of his own.

He asks again.

I answer again, patiently, as if he hadn’t just asked me — as if we hadn’t worked on the car all morning.

We make a plan. I’ll come in the morning when they arrive. It becomes an adventure instead of a problem. He gets tired after the anxiety and says he’ll go to bed early.

A little while later he texts:

Will you be over tomorrow at 10:30?

I say yes.

Then:

Thank you for helping me.

⸻

I lie awake again that night.

He once explained the world to me — how mortgages worked, how to plan ahead, how to fix things before they broke.

Now I hold the frame while pieces shift.

Some days I feel like the scaffolding around a building that is quietly failing — not stopping it, only holding it up a little longer.

And in the middle of it, small mercies:

He still knows who I am.

He still calls me.

He still thanks me.

Morning will come.

I will go over at 10:30.

He will be waiting for me to remember.