The Notebook on Evelyn’s Nightstand
It was Evelyn’s funeral lunch. The women who made those potatoes had known her fifty years. She had been the treasurer of that church for eleven of them. I was not going to raise my voice over her casseroles. And the plain truth was, it was their mother’s house. The key was theirs to ask for.
So I reached down for my purse.
I should tell you how I came to have the key in the first place.
Six years before, in October, Evelyn had a stroke at her kitchen sink. She was seventy-eight. The neighbor saw her through the window and called the ambulance, and by the time I got to the hospital from work they already knew it was a bad one. Her left side was gone and her words were mixed.
My husband, Steve, was in Nebraska with a load. He drives long haul. He has for thirty years, a refrigerated trailer, mostly pork out of the plant here headed west and produce coming back. He pulled into the truck stop at North Platte and called me, and I could hear him breathing.
“I can drop this in Cheyenne and be back by tomorrow night,” he said.
“Then do that,” I said. “I’ve got her till then.”
That was the first time I said it. I said it a good many times after.
Evelyn was in the hospital nine days and at the rehab place for five weeks, and then the insurance was done with her and it was time to say where she would go. Janet and Paula came for that meeting. We sat in a little room with a social worker and a box of tissues.
Janet had a legal pad. When she heard what the nursing home would cost, she set down her pen.
“Mom would hate it there anyway,” Paula said.
“She wants to go home,” I said. “She’s said so every day. She said it this morning.”
Everybody looked at me, and I heard what I had just volunteered for. Nobody stopped me.
It was not a crazy plan. Steve and I lived six blocks from Evelyn’s house. Our boy was grown and gone to Davenport. I went down to twenty hours a week at the deli, mornings, and a neighbor girl sat with Evelyn until noon. The rest of it was me. Janet took over her mother’s checkbook from Ankeny, on the computer, which was a real help and I said so.
The discharge nurse at the rehab place was the one who told me to start the notebook.
“Get yourself something sturdy,” she said. “Write down every pill and when she took it. Write her blood pressure. Write what she ate and whether she kept it down. When you’re tired you will not remember, and the doctor will ask.”
I stopped at the drugstore on the way home and bought a green five-subject spiral notebook, the fat kind, two hundred sheets. It cost four dollars and some cents. I wrote the date at the top of the first page and under it I wrote, “Home 2:15. Ate half a grilled cheese. All evening pills. Cried when she saw her own kitchen.”
I did not mean to put that last part. That was how it went from then on, though. I wrote small, a few lines a day, five or six days to a page. The pills and the pressure and the food, like the nurse said. And then whatever else there was.
“Walked to the mailbox with the walker and back. Proud of herself.”
“Bad night. Up at 1 and 3. Thought I was her sister Dorothy. I let her.”