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little red notepad. She was a list maker, and had apparently made a list of everything she wanted to discuss and plan for. We all shut the fuck up as my mom took the floor. She opened the notebook as if she was reading an alternative version of “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” called “’Twas the Night Before the Shitstorm.”
    â€œShit is going to get bad, but we’ve all got to buck up and deal with it,” she explained. “I didn’t survive cancer by sitting around on my fat ass. And we’re not going to sit around on our fat asses while your dad dies. He’s going to live a long time, but we’ve got to be ready.”
    â€œYep, I’m going to live a long, long time,” confirmed my dad.
    We all nodded in agreement. Lou Gehrig’s disease is very unpredictable, so it’s hard to know exactly how fast and hard it’s going to hit. But my mom was right. It would be best to prepare for everything so we weren’t surprised when it started to get bad. We didn’t want to be the idiots who didn’t take the necessary precautions.
    â€œYour dad and I have talked, and here’s the plan…”
    The first order of business was what to do with the family house. We had moved into the house in 1991, a few months after we adopted Jessica and a year before my mom got cancer. The house was the gem of a predominately Mormon neighborhood called the Corn Patch, which we’d sometimes call the Porn Patch, just to offend our neighbors. We were the only non-Mormon family in the neighborhood, besides our across-the-street neighbor Ralph. It was a seven-bedroom, five-bathroom, three-story redbrick mansion surrounded by pine, aspen, and cottonwood trees. It boasted a tennis court, a swimming pool, a trampoline, a drinking fountain, three pinball machines, a hot tub, and a gazebo. And it was a giant middle finger to all our Mormon neighbors. “Ha ha. We don’t even believe in God and we still have a bigger house than all of you,” we’d think. They would then probably cite the cancer and Lou Gehrig’s disease as signs that there was a God and remind us that God punished nonbelievers.
    My mom said we could either keep the house and make it wheelchair accessible, or find a new house that was already wheelchair accessible. Renovations would include adding an elevator from the garage up to my parents’ bedroom, making a couple of bathrooms wheelchair accessible, building a few ramps, replacing the carpet with thinner material that would allow the wheelchair to roll with ease, and widening some of the doorways.
    Ultimately, my mom and dad decided that it would be easiest to stay in the house—that moving would be too much unnecessary work.
    â€œWe’re keeping the house, and we’re going to make it as comfortable and nice as ever,” my mom said. “We’re not moving into some dump because of this fucking disease. It’s not getting everything.”
    My parents were going to meet with architects and contractors to get the renovations going. I was happy we weren’t selling the family house. We had been through a lot in it; it was like an eighth family member. I’m sure some of our Mormon neighbors were hoping we’d get out and take our porn jokes with us, but the foulmouthed Marshalls were staying put.
    â€œI know it sucks that Dad’s dying and all, but it’s pretty fucking sweet that we’re going to have an elevator in the house,” I said as I sipped on my eggnog. Greg nodded in agreement, while Tiffany gave me a bitchy look. Add “elevator” to the list of our house’s awesome amenities.
    The next order of business on my mom’s list was how we were going to manage the disease once it started to get bad.
    â€œYour dad has taken care of me over the years, so now it’s my turn to take care of him. We’re going to do everything we can for as long as we