The Girl Who Read Him the Box Scores
I did not tell him I wasn’t going home.
There is a motel on Highway 281 on the north end of Hastings, and I took a room there for $74 and sat on the bed with fourteen statements spread out on the bedspread. I keep everything of Dad’s in an accordion file behind the seat of my pickup. My wife says I am the only man in Dawson County who files in a truck.
I called her first.
“I’m staying over,” I said. “I need to be at the home in the morning.”
“Is Leo all right?” Kim said.
“He’s fine. It’s the bill.”
I told her. She was quiet a second.
“Mark, that’s the thing the admissions woman talked you into. The day we moved him.”
“I know what it is.”
I remembered it exactly. The last week of July, last year. Dad was in a wheelchair in the lobby with a hospital bracelet still on his wrist, and a pleasant woman named Tammy had me at a round table with a folder of forms. She went down the optional services with a pen. Barber. Cable. Telephone. Then she tapped the last one.
“A lot of our out-of-town families like this one,” she said. “It’s our companion program. A paid companion stops in every single day, fifteen or twenty minutes, just to sit and visit. So he’s never sitting alone, Mr. Olson.”
I live in Cozad. I work the parts counter at the implement dealer there, six days a week, and from wheat harvest through corn harvest a man does not ask for Saturdays. Sunday is what I have. I leave after early church and I am in my father’s room by eleven, and I am back on the interstate by five so I can be behind the counter at seven Monday morning. That is ninety miles each way, and it is all I can do, and it has never felt like enough.
So when Tammy said he would never sit alone, I signed before she finished the sentence.
“Three hundred forty dollars a month,” I told Kim. “Fourteen months. That’s four thousand seven hundred sixty dollars.”
“You did the arithmetic.”
“Twice.”
“Then go to the office in the morning and get it back.”
“I’m going to.”
“You don’t sound like it.”
I looked at the statements. Fourteen identical lines.
“Kim, I paid that every month so I wouldn’t have to think about him in that chair from Monday to Saturday. I never asked him one time who came. I paid it and I felt better. That’s what I was buying.”
“You were buying him company.”
“I was buying me some peace. There’s a difference, and he’s the one who went without.”
She let that sit, which is one of the reasons I married her.
“Somebody’s been in that chair, though,” she said. “You said the girl who mops.”
“That’s the other thing I can’t get around.”
After we hung up I called my sister. Carol Jean is sixty-one and lives in Mesa, and she had her second knee replaced in the spring. She has not been able to make the trip in over a year and it eats at her. She calls Dad twice a week and me after each one, to compare notes.
“A housekeeper,” she said, when I told her. “Reading him box scores.”
“That’s what he says.”
“Every day?”
“Every day she works.”
“Mark, who is she?”
“I don’t know. I intend to find out before I do anything else.”