The Van I Bought for Sofia After I Almost Swiped Left

I almost didn't message her. That's the part nobody knows.

Her profile picture was a close-up, cropped tight, so you couldn't see the wheelchair in frame. The bio said something like "I move a little different but I laugh a lot." I read that twice and thought, is this a joke. I'd seen guys on that app make fun of disabled people before, posting fake profiles for laughs, and for about ten seconds I figured this was one of those. Then I felt like garbage for thinking it. I swiped right before I could talk myself out of it.

My name's Derek Halloway. I was thirty-one then, teaching tenth-grade chemistry at a public high school on the North Side of Chicago, living alone in a one-bedroom off Lincoln Avenue with a radiator that clanked all winter and a downstairs neighbor whose dog barked every single time the elevator dinged. None of that matters to the story except that it's the life I almost didn't let anyone into.

Her name's Sofia Reyes. Twenty-seven, from Logan Square, diagnosed at twenty-one with something called SCA7 — spinocerebellar ataxia type 7. Genetic. Progressive. It had already taken her balance, was working on her eyes, and would eventually come for her ability to speak. She told me all of this in the third message we exchanged, no warm-up, no easing into it. I got upset. Not at her — at myself, because my first thought was that she was testing me, seeing if I'd bail, and I hated that my brain went there before my heart did.

My buddy Marcus, who I'd known since college, told me to just take her to dinner and shut up for once. So I did.

I picked Tango Sur on Southport, the Argentine steakhouse with the long line out front, because I'd called ahead and confirmed they had a ramp and a wide table near the door. I didn't tell her I'd checked. I just showed up early and asked the hostess to seat us there.

She rolled in twenty minutes late, apologizing about a bus lift that wouldn't lower. I noticed her hands shook a little setting her water glass down, how she timed her sips between sentences like she was managing something invisible. I noticed she ordered the steak well-done and cut it into pieces smaller than I would have, and I understood, without her saying a word, that swallowing wasn't simple for her anymore. I looked into her eyes the whole dinner because I didn't know where else to look that wouldn't feel like staring at the chair.

Later she told her best friend it wasn't going to work out, that I was too intense, too eager, that it made her nervous. Her friend told her to give me a real chance instead of bolting. I didn't know any of that at the time. I only knew I drove home that night replaying the way she'd laughed at my terrible joke about the chimichurri sauce, and I texted Marcus: I think I just met someone.

Second date, I picked her up outside her building on Milwaukee Avenue. There's a loading zone right by her entrance, and the actual parking is half a block down past a dry cleaner that's been closed since before I moved to the city. Nobody told me to pull into the loading zone. I just watched how long it took her to get from the door to a car on a normal day, did the math, and parked there. When I came around to open her door she looked at me like I'd done something strange.

"You didn't have to do that," she said.

"I know."

That was it. No big speech. I just got it, the way you get that a stove's hot without someone telling you twice.

Here's the thing people don't ask about — what it's actually like, day to day, loving someone with a disease that keeps moving the goalposts. It's not dramatic most of the time. It's lighting a lavender candle because the new medication makes her nauseous and the smell helps. It's learning which grocery store on Fullerton has automatic doors that actually work, because two of them around us never fixed theirs. It's me standing outside a CVS at Belmont and Clark on a Tuesday night in February, arguing with a pharmacist because her insurance had flagged her prescription for review and she had maybe a three-day supply left, and without it her speech could slide backward fast. I remember the pharmacist's name tag said Denise. I remember it was nine degrees out and I'd left my car running illegally in the fire lane the whole time. Denise finally called the doctor's after-hours line herself and got an emergency override. I bought Sofia a bag of the sour gummy worms she likes on the way out, because it felt stupid to walk back to the car with nothing in my hands.

That's the stuff that actually tests a relationship. Not the first date. The three a.m. stuff.

We'd been together fourteen months when she had a bad stretch — her swallowing got worse for about six weeks, she lost eleven pounds she didn't have to lose, and one night she looked at me, or tried to, her eyes doing that thing where they wander because the muscle control was slipping, and she said, in words that came out slower than usual, that I should leave before I was stuck taking care of a vegetable.

I'd heard her use that word about herself before. I never liked it.

I didn't argue with her that night. I just went home, and the next morning I drove to the Secretary of State office on Elston, then to her neurologist's clinic at Rush, and I asked what paperwork existed to make me her formal healthcare proxy — the legal document that lets someone speak for you medically when you can't speak for yourself. The intake coordinator printed it out right there at the counter, a stack maybe six pages, and told me Sofia would need to sign it too, with witnesses. I drove back to her place with that folder under my arm like it was the most normal errand in the world.

She read through it at her kitchen table. Her hands were doing the shake they do when she's stressed.

"You're not scared of this," she said. Not really a question.

"I'm scared of a lot of things. This isn't one of them."

We signed it two weeks later with Marcus and her neighbor as witnesses.

The van came after that. Sofia's mobility had been getting harder to manage on public transit — she'd had a bad fall years before at the Belmont Red Line stop when the elevator was out and her walker got caught in the escalator track, and even now, years later, she wouldn't go near an escalator without her pulse spiking. I started pricing used wheelchair-accessible minivans that spring, a 2021 Honda Odyssey with a BraunAbility conversion, and found one in Skokie for forty-one thousand dollars. I had about nine thousand saved. I took out a five-year loan for the rest and didn't tell her until the dealer called to say it was ready for pickup.

I drove it to her building on a Saturday in May. She came down in her chair, saw the ramp folding out of the side door on its own, and for a second she didn't move at all — just watched the ramp lower like it was the strangest thing she'd ever seen.

"You didn't have to do that either," she said.

"I know," I said again. "That's kind of the point."

She rolled up the ramp herself, locked her chair into the floor anchors we'd had installed, and sat there in the driver's-seat-height passenger spot for a long minute before she said anything.

"Where are we even going?"

"Nowhere. I just wanted you to see it before dark."

We ended up driving along the lake, past Montrose Harbor, windows cracked even though it was barely fifty-five degrees out, her favorite station playing something neither of us could name. She didn't cry. Neither did I. We just drove, and at one point she reached over and turned the radio down a notch so she could hear herself think, and that was enough.