The Job in My Mother’s Kitchen
I do not say that to make him out a monster. He called her some. He is not a man who hits or steals or lies for sport. He is a man who gets a thing handled and then cannot stand to be asked about it.
I was the one who asked.
It was a Wednesday in June. I had come down to trim Mom’s toenails, which is a thing a daughter does. There was a copy of the monthly statement on her dresser, dropped in her room by mistake, because Mom had not seen one since she moved in.
Base rate, $4,900. I knew that number.
Under it was a line I did not know. Care level two, $650.
“Mom,” I said, into her good ear. “What’s care level two?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” she said. “Is it the bath girl? I had a bath girl when I had the pneumonia.”
She had had pneumonia in March. For three weeks an aide had helped her in the shower. By April she was doing it herself again, and she was proud of it.
I have cooked in the cafeteria at the grade school in St. Paul for nineteen years, and I know how a thing gets put on a form and never comes off. If that $650 had started in March, it had come out of her account four times.
Mom’s money was not my inheritance. I was counting months. A hundred and eighteen thousand dollars and Dad’s savings sounds like a great deal until you divide it by $5,550, and then it sounds like a woman who had better not live to ninety-two.
So I walked down to the business office with the paper in my hand and asked the lady there, politely, what care level two was and who had ordered it.
She said she could only discuss the account with the responsible party. She said she would give him a call.
She did. And what my brother heard, in his office in Omaha with a client waiting, was that his little sister was down at the home going through the bills behind his back.
He called me that night.
“What are you doing, Sue?”
“Asking a question.”
“You’re asking it at the front office like I’ve got my hand in her purse.”
“I never said that. I said there’s a charge nobody can explain.”
“It’s handled.”
“Keith, have you looked at it?”
There was a quiet on the line that answered me.
“I’m not going to be audited by you,” he said. “I’ve got it handled. Let it be.”
And the next morning he sent the home an email. I have read it since. It said all questions about his mother’s account were to come to him and him only. It said his sister’s visits were agitating their mother, and he was asking that they be put on hold until things settled down.
I had agitated one person in that family, and it was not her.
I called him nine times that Sunday and the week after.
He answered none of them. On the Tuesday he sent one text.
“Let it cool down, Sue. She’s fine. They take good care of her.”
My husband read it over my shoulder at the kitchen table. Dale has run the scale house at the co-op elevator for twenty-six years, and he is not a man who raises his voice, but I watched the back of his neck go red.
“I’ll go to Omaha,” he said. “Tonight. I’ll be on his porch when he gets home, and he can explain it to me.”