"Recently, he was so slow getting ready for an event, the others picked him up, carried him out and loaded him in the van," she says. "Do they know each other or what?"
Day, like the other two, has a developmental disability, though physicians consider him a high-functioning special-needs adult. Day is so shy he was once reluctant to come out of his room.
Last month, he was named "King of the Dance" at a neighborhood party, a memory that inspires gales of laughter as a visitor looks at his trophy.
"We couldn't be happier with how far Paul has come," says his father, Louis Day, a retired assistant principal in the Anne Arundel school system. "He has come out of himself much more since [living here]. You're always looking for progress."
Later, at the dining-room table, Brick boasts of his first-place finish in a recent golf tournament (he alternated shots with a Special Olympics coach). Rickard mentions a recent decision to drop softball in favor of track.
"It wasn't enough exercise," he says. "I like to run."
It's just the kind of give-and-take the men's parents hoped to cultivate when they decided years ago, on the advice of experts, to get the jump on the notoriously slow-moving state and federal bureaucracies in the world of special-needs care.
More than 20 years ago, they put their sons' names on a "critical-needs" housing list.
"You can wait for years and years," says Raleigh, an employee of Gallagher Securities, a nonprofit subsidiary of Catholic Charities. (Gallagher owns the Ternwing house and others in the county.) "There are waiting lists to be on waiting lists."
Ternwing didn't open up until 2001. The parents and "boys," as their supporters often call them, jumped at the chance.
It's a rare setup, the only special-needs home in Anne Arundel County in which four friends, and only four friends, live together full time, Raleigh says. In many cases, disabled adults are lucky to have a chance to live with one person they already know.
The arrangement also offered a pretty fair answer to a question that haunts most parents of people with disabilities: "What will happen when we're not around anymore?"
"In many cases, it's a double-whammy for the disabled child, who's probably an adult by then," says Day's mother, Louisa Day, 67, of Annapolis. "When the last parent passes away, not only does that child suffer that loss, but he or she can end up in a new home all of a sudden, probably among strangers."
