The Girl Who Read Him the Box Scores
“I didn’t know any of this,” she said quietly.
“No ma’am,” I said. “None of us did. That’s about the size of the whole evening.”
Mrs. Driscoll called me at the parts counter the next morning at ten after nine. Four thousand seven hundred sixty dollars. She had the same number I did.
The check came in eleven days, with a letter over her own name, not the company’s. It did not say “billing error.” It said the home had charged for a service it did not provide and that she had failed to catch it. I have read a good many letters from businesses and that is the only one I ever kept.
Donna got hers the same week. So did the sisters, and the man in the seed corn cap, whose name is Dale. Dale told me his came to just under six thousand, and that he took Joan a dozen roses and told her she had been right all three times.
On the fifteenth day I called the state long-term care ombudsman’s office in Lincoln and told a patient woman the whole thing, start to finish. She already had a report on her desk from the administrator, dated the morning after the meeting. She said that did not happen as often as I might think. She said there would be a review of the home’s billing, and there was, and the companion program came out of the admissions folder for good until there was a person to do it.
I told her one more thing, for the record. I told her about the housekeeper.
I also wrote a letter to the home office in Grand Island. It was one page. I am not a writer, and Kim fixed my commas. I said that for fourteen months the only companion visits on the two hundred hall had been done for free by an employee on her own break, and that if they were looking for somebody to fill a job that had been open since a year ago April, she was already in the building pushing a bucket.
I do not know if my letter did it. I think Mrs. Driscoll had made up her mind that Thursday night, writing on the back of that paper.
She called Angie into her office the first week of October. Angie told me later she thought she was being let go for sitting in a resident’s room.
Instead Mrs. Driscoll offered her the activities assistant job. Full time, two dollars more an hour, and the home would pay for her to take the activity director course so she could run the department someday. Mrs. Driscoll told her the companion visits would be hers to build back, properly, with a schedule and a sign-in sheet in every room. And nobody would be charged for them until she said the program was real.
Angie asked if she could think about it.
“What’s to think about?” I asked her, the Sunday after. She was still in gray scrubs, working out her last two weeks on the floors.
“Who’s going to do the two hundred hall right,” she said. “They’ll miss the corners.”
“Angie.”
“And I won’t get my break in there anymore. It’ll just be my job.” She twisted the mop handle. “I didn’t want it to turn into my job. He’d know the difference.”
My father had been listening from his recliner with his eyes shut.
“I’ll tell you the difference,” he said. “On your break you could give me fifteen minutes. On the clock I intend to get thirty. And I want the Cubs read first.”