The Girl Who Read Him the Box Scores
She was sitting forward in the straight chair, right up beside his recliner, with the paper held open in both hands and the mop bucket parked by the door behind her. He had his head back against the recliner and his eyes shut. His right hand was on the arm of the chair, and as she read down the lineup his fingers were moving. He was keeping the hits. When I was a boy he kept score at my Legion games on the back of a feed sack ticket, and he did it the same way, thumb to each finger and around again.
She read every line. All nine batters. The pitchers, with their innings. She read the time of the game and the attendance, and he grunted at the attendance.
Then she turned the page.
“Cubs lost,” she said.
“I don’t need to hear that one.”
“Three to two. In ten.”
“I said I don’t need to hear it.”
“You want the Yankees?”
“I never want the Yankees.”
“I know. I just like to ask.”
She folded the paper to the sports page, the way you fold it so a man can find it again, and laid it in his lap. He put both hands flat on it.
“Volleyball’s Wednesday,” she said. “The Huskers. I’ll have that Thursday.”
“I’ll be here.”
“You better be.”
She looked at her watch, and stood, and put the chair back exactly where it had been. Fifteen minutes. I do not think she ran ten seconds over.
When she turned to roll the bucket out she nearly ran it into me. I backed into the hall and she followed, pulling it after her.
She knew who I was. I could see that. She had seen me on Sundays from the far end of some hall, and she went white under her freckles.
“Mr. Olson. I’m on break,” she said, fast. “I’m clocked right, I’ve got till half past, I wasn’t taking company time. You can ask Deb.”
“Angie,” I said. “I’m not here to get you in trouble.”
“Yes sir.”
“I’m Mark. Leo’s boy.”
“I know. He says you’re in parts.” She almost smiled, and stopped herself. “He says you can find a bearing by the sound a man makes describing it.”
That one got me somewhere under the ribs. I did not know my father said things about me.
“Can I ask you something,” I said. “Are you the companion they send?”
She frowned. “The what?”
“The home has a program. Somebody paid to sit with a resident every day.”
“No sir. I’m housekeeping. I do the two hundred hall and the hundred hall and the front lobby.” She glanced back at his door. “That’s just my break.”
“Your break.”
“I get two fifteens and a lunch. I take the morning one in there.”
“How long have you been doing it?”
She had to think. “Since about the week he came. They put his name on the door and I thought, it can’t be. So I asked him. I said, were you the mail carrier at Juniata. And he said, who’s asking, and I said Helen’s granddaughter, on the Roseland road, and he said, white house, green shutters, a blue heeler named Skip that never once bit me but thought about it every day for eleven years.”
“That sounds like him.”
“He carried my grandma’s mail for thirty years.” She said it as if it settled the whole matter.
“That’s a long time to carry somebody’s mail,” I said. “It’s not a reason to give up your break every day for fourteen months.”