The Job in My Mother’s Kitchen
The girl at the front desk ran her finger down the page twice, slowly, the way you do when you already know the answer and are hoping to be wrong.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re not on here anymore.”
I was holding a sour cream coffee cake in a nine by thirteen pan with a dish towel over it. It was still warm through the towel. I had baked it at six that morning in St. Paul and driven it twenty-two miles down Highway 281 to Grand Island, the same as I had every Sunday for a year.
“I’m Sue,” I said. “Dorothea’s daughter. Room 114. You know me, Tammy.”
“I know you.” She was maybe twenty-three, and she had gone pink right up to her hairline. “It’s the approved list. It got changed Thursday. I’m not supposed to sign in anybody who isn’t on it.”
“Who changed it?”
“The responsible party.” She looked down at the page so she would not have to look at me. “Your brother. He’s her health care agent, and he signed her admission agreement. He told the office your visits agitate her. We follow the agent’s instructions until somebody above us says different. You’d have to take it up with him.”
Agitate. I trimmed her toenails and brought her chokecherry jelly.
Behind her, through the glass doors, I could see the long hall and the corner where it turned toward the east wing. My mother was sixty feet past that corner, in a blue recliner, with her good ear turned toward the door, waiting on a daughter who came every Sunday after early church.
“Can you take her the cake?”
“I’ll take her the cake,” she said.
I handed it over, towel and all. Then I walked back out to the truck and sat there with both hands on the wheel, and I did not start it for a long time.
I knew exactly why my name was gone. It had taken four days.
My mother moved into Cottonwood Court the second week of June, one year before that Sunday. She was eighty-five then. She had fallen in her kitchen in St. Paul that April and lain on the linoleum three hours before a neighbor found her. After that my brother Keith drove out from Omaha, sat at her table with a yellow legal pad, and worked it all out in an afternoon.
I will say this for Keith. He is good at an afternoon.
He is fifty-eight, three years older than me, and he sells crop insurance in Omaha. Mom named him her health care agent herself, clear as a bell. He signed the admission agreement as the responsible party and took over her bills. He was the oldest and he had a head for figures, and I did not argue.
The house sold for $118,000. Cottonwood Court cost $4,900 a month. Every dollar of that came out of her own account, the house money and what Dad had left her. Dad has been gone since 2011.
Keith set the bill up to come out of her checking on the first of every month. He had her mail forwarded to his house so nothing would get lost. Then he went back to Omaha, 150 miles east on the interstate, and I think in his mind the job was finished. He had built the fence. The cow was in it.
He came at Christmas with a poinsettia. He came on her birthday in May and took her to lunch. That was the year.