Megan and Chris drove up from the Bay Area after church for Sunday dinner with a shopping bag full of bride magazines and a folder that says WEDDING on the tab in Megan's handwriting. Saturday, April 29, 2000. The church is booked. The hall is booked. My daughter is getting married.

Chris watched the golf with Bill in the den while Megan and I peeled potatoes. The Americans were losing and then they weren't, and I heard Bill cheering and clapping, the old way, loud. He hasn't followed golf in a year. He didn't know who was playing or where. He knew it was a comeback, and that was enough. He kept calling Chris "Tom," which is our son's name. Chris just answered to it. I could marry that boy myself.

Over the dishes Megan asked me the question she has been carrying around since he proposed. "Will Daddy be able to walk me down the aisle?" I said I don't know, honey. I said we'll do it together, him and me, one on each side, and if he has a bad day we'll just hold on tighter. She put her head on my shoulder with her hands still in the dishwater.

When they left, Bill walked Megan out to the car and held the door for her the way he always has. He looked at her a long time. Then he said, "You look like my daughter." She said, "I am your daughter, Daddy." He said, "Well. Good." And patted the roof of the car.

I don't know what that was. I've been sitting here for an hour trying to decide if it was the saddest thing I've ever heard or the sweetest. I think it was both. That's what most things are now.

Support group. Tuesdays at seven in the Methodist church fellowship hall, folding chairs, bad coffee, a box of Kleenex that goes around the circle like a collection plate. Carol runs it. Her mother had it for eleven years, and Carol knows everything and never once makes you feel stupid for asking.

Tonight we talked about guilt, which means I talked about the respite weekend and cried, and then Frank talked about putting his wife in the care home in July and cried, and then Dolores said she felt guilty for not feeling guilty anymore, and we all laughed so hard Carol had to wait for us. That's the thing nobody tells you about the group. We laugh more than anybody I know.

Carol says guilt is just love that doesn't have anywhere to go. I wrote that on my hand in pen so I'd remember it in the car.

Bill was up at 3:10 this morning in his gray suit and his good tie, asking if the buses were running. I told him it was Saturday. He said, "Oh. Well, then." and sat on the edge of the bed in his suit until the sun came up. I sat with him. Too tired to write more.

I went away for a weekend. I want to write that down plainly because I've been saying it to myself all day as if it were a crime. Friday afternoon I drove Bill to a care home out past Carmichael that takes people for short stays, and I drove to Megan's, and on Saturday we went to three bridal shops, and in the third one she came out of the dressing room in ivory with little buttons all the way down the back, and the saleslady and I both started crying at the same time.

I called the care home four times. Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday night, Sunday morning. He was fine every time. He ate his dinner. He watched the television. He asked for me once, the aide said, and she told him I was visiting our daughter, and he said "good for her."

When I picked him up Sunday he was sitting in the lobby with his hat on his knee. He stood up and kissed me and said, "There you are. Did you get the milk?" He didn't know I'd been gone two days. I don't know which I was more afraid of on the drive over, that he'd be angry or that he wouldn't have noticed. It turns out I was right to be afraid of the second one.

Everyone says I needed the rest. I did. I slept nine hours Saturday night for the first time in a year. I am still sitting here feeling like I left my husband at a bus station.

Schools went back yesterday all over town. Bill watched the children go past with their backpacks this morning from the front window and said, "I'm late." Thirty-one years in schools, nineteen of them as principal, and every September of his life he was at the front doors by seven shaking hands. It's in him deeper than my name.

It was a day-care day, thank goodness. He goes Monday, Wednesday and Friday to the adult day program at the senior center, nine to three. The first month he wouldn't get out of the car. Then Rosa, who runs it, figured out who he used to be. Now when he walks in she says "Good morning, Mr. Mackey," and gives him a clipboard, and he walks around and checks on everybody and helps set up the chairs for exercise. He thinks he works there. Maybe he does. She says the other men follow him around.

Those six hours, three days a week, are the only time I can go to the bank, the doctor, the grocery store without watching the door. Today I sat in the car in the supermarket parking lot for twenty minutes and didn't go in. I just sat there. That was the whole errand.

A good day. I want to put the good ones down too, so I'll have them.

We drove out to Folsom Lake early before the heat. We used to go every Sunday in the summers when the kids were little, and I thought maybe the road would feel familiar to him. The water's way down this time of year, so there's a long stretch of beach, and we walked out to the edge and sat on a rock with our shoes off.

Bill picked up a flat stone and skipped it. Four skips. Then he did it again, and again, and he was counting out loud, and he taught me how to hold my wrist, which he has taught me every summer since 1962 because I have never once gotten the hang of it. He told me the same thing he always told the kids: "Low and flat, like you're throwing it at a turtle." And then he called me Joanie. He hasn't called me Joanie since spring.

We stayed till the sun got high. He fell asleep in the car on the way home with his hand open on the seat between us. I kept mine in it until the stoplight at Greenback.

Tomorrow he might not know where we went. Today he did.

Yesterday afternoon Bill walked to the mailbox at the corner to mail the electric bill, the way he has a thousand times. It's two blocks. After twenty minutes I went out to look for him. After forty I was running up and down the street in my house slippers. Our neighbor Ed found him four blocks the other way, standing on a corner in the sun holding the envelope, not upset, just waiting. He told Ed he was waiting for the light to change. There isn't a light there.

I've ordered him one of the Safe Return bracelets from the Alzheimer's Association, with his name and a phone number to call. He'll hate it. He hated his wedding ring for the first year too, and he still wears that.

At the doctor's last week Dr. L. said the Aricept is probably still doing something, it's hard to know, and we'll keep him on it. One little pill every morning with his orange juice. I watch him swallow it every day like it's a promise somebody made us.

After Ed brought him home, Bill sat at the kitchen table and said, very calmly, "Joan, I think something's the matter with me." He hasn't said that in a year. I held his hand and said yes, sweetheart, there is. And then five minutes later it was gone again, and he asked what was for supper.

Two years ago this month a neurologist sat across a desk from us and said the words "early-onset Alzheimer's disease." Bill was fifty-nine. He'd been principal at the same high school for nineteen years, and that spring he'd started losing teachers' names, and then he got lost driving home from the district office, a drive he'd made a thousand times. He retired that June. The staff gave him a plaque and a party, and he gave a beautiful speech with his notes held very tight in his hand.

I'm fifty-eight. We've been married thirty-six years. We were going to travel.

A woman in my support group reads journals on the computer that people keep about their own lives, and she said I should write one. I told her who would want to read about this? She said, the next wife. So this is for the next wife. And for me, because I'm forgetting too, in my own way. I forget what his voice sounded like when he was himself, all day, on an ordinary Tuesday. I don't want to forget anything else.