The Notebook on Evelyn’s Nightstand
Rosa turned again. Farther back this time.
“May the twelfth. Mother’s Day. Flowers came from the girls at 10, pink carnations. She had me put them where she could see from the bed. Asked me four times who they were from so she could hear it again. Asked would they be coming. Told her it’s a long drive. She said, ‘It is. It is a long drive.’ Would not eat lunch. Ate a little supper. I put the card on her pillow.”
By then it was not two tables listening. It was the hall. The choir ladies had turned around in their chairs. Donna had come out from behind the counter with a dish towel in her hands. Pastor Hal, who had been making his way around the room shaking hands, had stopped behind Paula’s chair and stood there with his head down like a man at prayer.
Rosa closed the notebook over her finger to keep the place. She took her glasses off.
“I’m going to say something,” she said, “and then I’ll sit down, because this isn’t my family and it isn’t my place. But I’ve been a hospice nurse twenty-two years, and I have been in a lot of back bedrooms.”
She was talking to Janet and Paula, but she did not lower her voice any.
“Your mother was in a bed the better part of two years. She did not have one bedsore. Not one. Do you know what that takes? That is somebody turning her every two hours, around the clock, and rubbing lotion on her heels. I have patients in facilities with a whole staff who can’t manage that.”
She laid her hand flat on the green cover.
“Six years. I counted it up once, sitting in her driveway. Two thousand one hundred and ninety days, give or take a leap day. There is an entry for every single one. I have had maybe three families in my whole career keep a log at all. Nobody ever kept one like this. I used it to set her medicines. Her doctor used it. It is the reason she got to die in her own bed and not in the emergency room.”
She looked over at me then, standing there like a fool with a tray of coffee.
“This lady bathed your mother and fed your mother and sat up with your mother, and when your mother was frightened in the night it was this lady’s name she called. I don’t know what’s in that envelope she put in her purse. But I thought the church ought to hear it, since nobody else was going to say it.”
And she handed the notebook back to Janet, and she went back to her table and sat down.
It was very quiet.
I set the tray on the nearest table before I dropped it. My face was burning. I had not wanted this. I had wanted to hand over a book and go pour coffee.
“That’s enough now,” I said, to nobody. “It was just what needed doing. Anybody would have.”
“No,” said a man’s voice behind me. “They wouldn’t.”
It was Steve.
He had been out in the parking lot helping the funeral director load the flowers for the nursing home. He was standing inside the double doors in his one suit, with a potted mum still in his arms. I do not know how long he had been there. Long enough.