My husband’s mother tucked a square of cake from her own party into the pocket of her housecoat, with eleven people singing at her.
The aide cutting it laughed and said she STASHES THINGS now.
The portal said she’d finished every bite of every meal since the second of May.
Her watch had been creeping up toward her elbow all summer, and every visit I slid it back down.
I picked Linden Court.
Her pension and my paycheck cover the sixty-nine hundred.
Rod’s name is on her papers.
Arlene drove a school bus for thirty-three years.
Route 6, out past the co-op elevator.
She never once pulled away from a kid still running for the door.
A stroke two winters back took her right hand and half her words.
She can still tell you the date and what gas costs.
The next week it was three creamer cups in that pocket.
The week after, half a grilled cheese folded in a paper towel.
I only found the meal page because the bill sits on the tab beside it.
Intake, every day: COMPLETE.
Weight, bottom of the same screen: down 19 pounds.
“Oh, she eats like a horse,” Brandi said, and turned the tablet toward the wall.
I told Rod that night.
“She looks fine to me, Dawn,” he said.
“Don’t start a hell of a thing over crackers.”
So I started taking my lunch hour at hers.
Her tray showed up at 12:10.
The milk still had its foil lid SEALED.
Half an hour later a girl in plum scrubs carried it out and touched the screen mounted by the door.
It went in as COMPLETE.
That right hand stays closed.
She can’t peel a lid off anything.
I cut the meatloaf small and fed it to her.
She cleaned the plate and asked was there pie.
“Arlene, if you’re hungry you have to say so,” I said.
“I had my lunch,” she said, in the voice she saved for the pastor.
“Get me something I can see,” Rod said.
So I pulled up the birthday video to trim off the part where everybody’s finding a seat.
A woman is talking just outside the frame.
Her face never comes into it.
Her voice is right under the singing.
“Arlene, what do we tell Dawn when she comes?”
“I HAD MY LUNCH.”
I sat out in the parking lot with the volume all the way up.
I played it until the phone went black.
Friday I came through the day room with my phone out and the video cued.
Somebody had left a lighthouse puzzle half done on the card table.
She caught my wrist with her good hand.
“The other one,” she said.
“Show her Memorial Day.”
Memorial Day I’d propped my phone on her windowsill so Rod’s sister in Tucson could see her.
Then I walked off and forgot it.
Fifty-two minutes.
I’d never watched past the first.
I found it and set my thumb over it.
Her grip didn’t loosen.
She was looking over my shoulder, at the doorway.
Minute thirty-one
Brandi was standing in the day room doorway with a lunch tray against her hip and a straw in her teeth.
I kept my thumb where it was and pressed.
The Memorial Day clip opens on a ceiling tile and the top of Arlene’s curtain, because I’d leaned the phone crooked against the window latch.
I dragged the little bar along with my finger until the picture moved.
The door opens thirty-one minutes in.
Brandi comes in with a tray. She sets it on the dresser beside the television, a good six feet from the bed, and lifts off the dome.
Arlene says, “Lunch.”
It’s the only word she spends on it.
Brandi sits down in the vinyl chair I always pull up to the bed, and she eats the pie off Arlene’s tray with Arlene’s spoon.
It takes her about four minutes. She checks her own phone twice while she chews.
Arlene reaches toward the dresser with her left hand. It’s too far. The watch slides down over her knuckles, and she quits reaching to push it back up her arm.
Brandi snaps the dome back on, picks up the tray, full except for the pie, and carries it out. Passing the door, she touches the screen.
Arlene keeps looking at the dresser.
She looks at it for the rest of the clip, while the square of sun from the window crawls across her blanket and off the end of the bed.
Her hand was still around my wrist in the day room. It was the hardest she’d held on to anything since the stroke.
A blue puzzle piece, all sky, had fallen under the card table. I looked at that.
Brandi moved the tray to her other hip.
“Lunchtime, Arlene,” she said.
Then she looked at me.
“Early today, Dawn,” she said. “Rod said you’d be in at noon again.”
I didn’t answer her.
I stopped the clip and laid the phone face down on my knee.
“He says you get worked up,” Brandi said. She smiled the way the girl at the bank smiles when your card won’t go through.
She went off down the hall toward Arlene’s room with the tray.
Arlene let go of my wrist so I could push her chair.
The tray was on the dresser when we got there. The dome was on. The milk cup still had its foil flat across the top.
I carried it to the bed, peeled the foil, and held the cup while she drank all of it without stopping once.
Then I cut the chicken and fed it to her.
Arlene ate with her eyes on the doorway.
When she was done she looked at the Timex, then at me.
I had never told Rod what time I got there.
I hadn’t told anybody.
So who had?
A Timex with a stretch band
I bought Arlene the watch the week she moved into Linden Court.
Gail Sorensen, the director, walked me through the place that same week. She showed me the dining room with the cloth napkins and the glass case of finches by the front desk, and she said, “We know every one of them by name.” She meant the residents.
I picked it over the Lutheran home in town because it was eleven miles from work instead of thirty, and because a woman in the dining room was laughing at something with her mouth full.
The watch came off the rack at the pharmacy by the highway. A Timex with a silver stretch band, the kind that pinches the hair on your arm.
Arlene wanted it before she wanted her own pillow.
For thirty-three years she drove Route 6 by the minute. 6:52 at the co-op elevator. 7:04 at the Haugen lane, where the youngest was always late and always running. 7:31 at the grade school, and to her 7:32 was a failure.
She waited on the Haugen boy anyway. She waited on all of them, door open, heater going.
The stroke took half her words.
It left the clock in her.
She can hear a cart in the hall, check the Timex, and tell you if it’s pills or trays.
The band was the thing I watched.
That May it sat snug on the knob of her wrist. Come July it rode halfway up her arm, and every visit I pushed it back down like a bracelet on a little girl.
Her party was the second Friday in August. Her eighty-fourth.
Val paid for the cake over the phone from Tucson. A half sheet from the Hy-Vee with a yellow frosting school bus on top and black gel in the windows.
Counting me, eleven people sang. Rod and me. Two cousins up from Wahoo. Three ladies from her hall. Wendell, who comes to anything with cake. The activities girl. Tonya from the nurses’ station. Brandi.
Brandi did the cutting.
She gave Arlene the corner with the bus on it.
Arlene got it off the paper plate with her good hand and down into her housecoat pocket before we got to the last line of the song, frosting first.
“She stashes things now,” Brandi said to me. She laughed and kept cutting.
Rod laughed too.
My Buick had a bad starter that week, so I drove his truck home and he rode with the cousins.
The sun was in my eyes on the county road. I flipped the visor down and an envelope slid halfway out from under the strap.
Linden Court’s green pine tree was printed in the corner.
I figured it for a copy of a bill. The bills come to my email. I pay them.
Her pension and her Social Security come to thirty-seven hundred a month. The thirty-two hundred left over comes out of my check, and has since the week of the Timex.
The money from her house on Birch Avenue sits in an account with Rod’s name on it. A hundred forty-two thousand dollars.
“That’s for when she really needs it,” Rod said, the one time I asked.
I pushed the envelope back under the strap and flipped the visor up.
Second seating
For three weeks I’d clocked out at 11:50.
Gene would look up at the clock over the parts counter and say, “Deere rep’s at one-thirty, Dawn,” or “Kuhlman’s coming for his hoses,” and I’d say I’d be back. I was always back by one.
The Wednesday after the day room, I walked into Arlene’s room at 12:05 with my car keys still in my hand.
Arlene looked at the Timex.
The tray didn’t come at 12:10.
It didn’t come at 12:25. It didn’t come at 12:40.
“Late,” Arlene said.
I went down to the nurses’ station. Tonya had her readers on and a bag of pretzels open next to the keyboard.
“She’s on second seating now,” Tonya said. “One-fifteen.”
“Since when?”
She scrolled. “Since Monday. Family asked.”
“I’m her family.”
“Other family,” she said. Then she heard it, and her neck went pink above her scrubs.
I had to be at the counter by one. I stayed.
The tray came at 1:22. Brandi carried it in, set it on the dresser, said, “Enjoy, you two,” and left.
I cut the chicken small and fed it to Arlene and held the milk for her.
I got back to work at ten after two. The Deere rep had come and gone. Gene had left the rep’s card on my chair.
Gene docked me the hour and twenty. He said he had to, and he looked at his boots while he said it.
Over supper Rod asked how his mother was. He asks every night.
“She ate,” I said.
“See?” he said, and reached for the butter.
He was in the garage afterward with the ballgame on the radio, sharpening the mower blade.
“Did you move her lunch?”
“Why would I move her lunch?”
“Tonya said family asked for it.”
“Val calls down there every other week,” he said. “Take it up with Tucson.”
He didn’t look up from the blade.
The portal had a new weigh-in that night. Down twenty-one pounds now. Meals: COMPLETE. COMPLETE. COMPLETE.
Friday I went at 1:15 and took the afternoon without pay.
Arlene had a packet of oyster crackers in her pocket. She worked it out with her good hand and pushed it into mine.
“You eat,” she said.
I called Val from the parking lot. She was on her break at the credit union.
“Dawn, I haven’t talked to a soul down there since the party,” she said. “I’m in Arizona. Why on earth would I move her lunch?”
I sat there with the crackers in my hand.
Val wasn’t on the papers.
Rod’s was the only other name on them.
The visor
That weekend Rod wanted the riding mower out of the back of the garage, and his truck was parked across the door.
“Move her for me, would you,” he said from the porch, and lobbed me the keys.
I got in and reached up for the garage opener clipped to the visor.
The envelope dropped into my lap.
It had been there since August. Rod had never touched it.
I opened it with the engine running.
A single sheet, folded in thirds.
CHANGE IN CARE LEVEL ran across the top in green. Resident: Arlene Kral. The date typed in the corner was May 9.
In the box below, somebody had written in blue ballpoint: Unable to open containers. Needs set-up and hands-on help at every meal. Weight trending down.
Additional monthly charge: $1,150.
Two boxes under that. Accept. Decline.
Decline had a check mark in it, and beside it R.K., in the fat blue pen Rod keeps in the cup holder.
A yellow sticky note was stuck to the back. Same pen. 2nd seating 1:15, OK per R. It had last Monday’s date on it.
I sat in his truck in our own driveway with the mower waiting and read the note until the letters stopped being letters.
May ninth. Two and a half weeks before I left my phone on her windowsill.
A week after the portal started saying COMPLETE.
I turned the engine off.
I went in through the kitchen. Our table has had the same yellow-check oilcloth on it since Rod’s dad passed, with a burn mark by the napkin holder from a pan I set down wrong in 2011.
I laid the sheet on the oilcloth, face up, with the sticky note beside it.
I set my phone next to them with the clip stopped at thirty-one minutes.
Then I went to the back door and said his name.
He came in wiping his hands on a shop rag.
He saw the sheet before he saw me.
I pressed play and turned the phone around.
The Accept box
He watched it standing up, all four minutes.
When Brandi carried the tray out, he reached over my shoulder and stopped it himself.
“So the girl ate a piece of pie,” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
“That’s a kid on a double eating a piece of pie. I’ve done worse than that on a propane route and you know it.”
He picked up the sheet and set it back down, square with the table edge.
“That’s eleven-fifty a month, Dawn. That’s thirteen-eight a year. She’s eighty-four. She could go three more years just like this. Do the math on three years.”
He tapped the R.K.
“That house money is what’s left of my mother. When she goes, half is Val’s and half is mine, and that was her idea. She said it at my dad’s funeral, standing right there by the coffee urn.”
“I watched her feed herself cake in front of eleven people. I stood there and watched her do it.”
“And you. You’re walking off the job every day at ten to twelve. Gene called the house. He was decent about it. He said, Rod, she’s the best office I’ve had, but I can’t hold the counter with nobody on it.”
“So yeah. I called down there. I asked them nice to move her lunch so you’d quit leaving work. That’s the whole crime.”
“Nobody’s starving. She’s still got a round face on her.”
He waited.
“She can’t get the foil off the milk,” I said.
He looked at the phone, at Arlene’s hand stopped in the air halfway to the dresser.
“Hell, Dawn,” he said. “Then they ought to open it for her. That’s what we pay them for.”
He threw the rag on the counter and went back out to the mower.
I folded the sheet and the sticky note together and put them in my purse.
The next morning I called Gene at seven and said I’d be in by ten.
I got to Linden Court at 7:40, with the breakfast carts still in the hall.
Arlene was up in her chair. I unfolded the sheet on her overbed table and smoothed it flat.
She read it for a long time.
She put her finger on the date.
“May nine,” she said.
Then she moved her finger to the R.K. and pointed at the vinyl chair by the bed.
“Rod,” she said.
I wheeled her down to Gail Sorensen’s office.
Gail had her coffee on the desk and her cardigan on the back of her chair. She looked at Arlene, then at me, then at the sheet I set in front of her.
I put my phone on top of it at thirty-one minutes, pressed play and turned the volume up.
Gail watched Brandi eat the pie.
She watched Arlene reach.
When it was done she took off her glasses and set them on the desk and didn’t say anything for a while.
Then she opened her bottom drawer, took out a clean copy of the same sheet, wrote the date on it, and turned it around on the desk toward Arlene.
Arlene took the pen in her left hand.
She put a big shaking A in the Accept box. She went over it twice so it would take.
I got my debit card out of my wallet and laid it on the sheet.
“Put the eleven-fifty on this card,” I said. “Monthly.”
Arlene was tapping the face of the Timex with one finger. Gail looked at it and wrote 12:10 at the bottom of the sheet.
I texted Gail the clip before I pulled out of the lot.
The next Wednesday, Brandi’s name was gone from the whiteboard at the nurses’ station.
That afternoon I called the woman who does payroll at the dealership and stopped the eight percent I’d been putting in my 401(k) since 2009. It comes out to about what Arlene eats.
I haven’t told Rod.
He hasn’t asked where the money comes from.
Two links out of the band
It’s been five weeks.
The tray comes at 12:10 now. An aide named Marisol brings it, a big woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she peels the foil off the milk before she sets it down. She cuts the meat. She pulls the vinyl chair up to the bed and stays.
Gene put me back on full days. I come Fridays on my lunch hour, and I’m back at the counter by one.
The portal says what Arlene eats now, in halves and quarters. Some days it says REFUSED next to the peas. She has never in her life eaten a pea.
She’s up four pounds.
I had the jeweler on the square pull two links out of the band.
It sits on the knob of her wrist again. I haven’t pushed it down once.
The May ninth sheet is still on our kitchen table, on the oilcloth by the burn mark. I put it back there after Gail’s. Rod eats his supper around it. So do I.
This Friday, when I stood up to go, Arlene worked something out of her housecoat pocket with her good hand.
A sugar cookie off her own tray, folded in a napkin.
She pushed it down into my coat pocket and patted it flat.
“For the drive,” she said.
Then she looked at the Timex, the way she used to look at it at the co-op elevator at 6:52 every school morning for thirty-three years, and nodded me out the door.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who’s spending their lunch hour in a building like that.
If you’re interested in more family stories, you might enjoy reading about My Mother Turned The Thermostat Down To 52 And Took The Formula Home or perhaps My sister-in-law pushed me in the same red dress she wore to our wedding.
