My dad tells the marketing director

when she asks why he’s thinking he might move in
to this community, independent or assisted living,
he says, “my son-in-law and daughter are extruding me”
and then he laughs so she knows it’s a joke,
which is hard to tell also because of his baseball cap
and the mask over his beard. He tells her his ailments
listing them off in a display of memory and medical know-how;
asks questions about costs, options and contingencies:
“say in three years I have a stroke,” he posits.
He agrees to use a wheelchair to see the available apartments
so he won’t have to hobble down the hallways,
admires the cabinets, the views, wonders what he’d do
with all his stuff—books, paintings, the bust of his mother
his uncle Paul had sculpted. I wonder how many elderly
folk the managing director has escorted with these same
pangs. Next on the tour, their work-out facilities, a gym—
here my dad gets up laboriously from his wheelchair
and climbs on to the elliptical, working out the pedals,
transforms into the guy who went to the Y every day
before Covid, moves on to the next machine, and the next,
saying, “I would spend a lot of time here,” but then
he’d have to stay masked in the common areas until
we don’t know when
and as he says, “Best to expect the worst.”
We drive him home, where he’d prefer to be.