The Girl Who Read Him the Box Scores
“Before the office?”
“The office can only give back money,” I said. “I want to know who’s been giving him the time.”
Carol Jean blew her nose.
“You tell her,” she said, “that she has a sister in Arizona she doesn’t know about.”
The business office at Cottonwood Court opens at eight. At eight I was sitting in the lobby with a cup of their coffee, facing the other way.
I had called my boss at six thirty. Jeff has run that parts department for twenty years and he has a mother in assisted living in Lexington. He said, “Take the morning, take the day, I’ll cover the counter,” and hung up before I could thank him.
An aide I knew, a heavyset, kind woman named Deb, came by with a linen cart and stopped.
“Mr. Olson. It’s Monday.”
“It is.”
“Is Leo all right?”
“He’s fine. Deb, can I ask you something? The girl who cleans his hall. Angie.”
Her face did a careful thing. “Is there a problem with his room?”
“No, ma’am. Not one. I’d just like to meet her.”
“She’s on the two hundred hall till ten or so. Then she takes her break.” Deb hesitated. “She’s a good worker. She doesn’t slack.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“She takes her break at ten fifteen,” Deb said, and she looked at me a moment longer than she needed to, and pushed her cart on.
I went and sat in the little alcove across from Dad’s room, where there is a fake ficus and a chair nobody uses. His door was half open. I could hear his radio going low, the farm report out of Grand Island.
At ten fifteen by the hall clock, a yellow mop bucket came rolling around the corner.
The young woman pushing it was small, maybe five foot two, in gray housekeeping scrubs, with a brown ponytail pulled through the back of nothing, just a rubber band. She looked about twenty-four. She had a folded newspaper tucked under one arm. She rolled the bucket just inside my father’s door and squared it against the wall, where it would be out of the way of his walker and out of the way of the hall.
She knocked on the open door with two knuckles.
“Morning, Mr. Olson. You ready?”
“I’ve been ready since six,” my father said. “What’d they do?”
“You want me to tell you or you want me to read it?”
“Read it. Don’t you spoil it.”
I heard the straight chair take her weight. I heard the paper shake open and fold back on itself.
I am fifty-five years old and I stood up out of that alcove and went and stood in my father’s doorway like a boy listening outside the principal’s office. She had her back to me. He could not have seen me if he tried.
“Kansas City seven, Minnesota four,” she read.
“There now.”
“You said don’t spoil it. That’s the top line, I have to read the top line.”
“Go on.”
“Kansas City. Witt, shortstop. Four at bats, one run, two hits, one batted in.”
“What kind of hits?”
“Hold on, that’s down at the bottom.” Paper rustled. “Double.”
“Off who?”
“It doesn’t say off who, Mr. Olson. It never says off who.”
“It used to.”
“It did not.”
He laughed. I had not heard my father laugh like that since before my mother’s funeral, a short dry laugh that comes out his nose.