The Job in My Mother’s Kitchen
“No.”
“Sue.”
“If you go out there, it’s a fight. And if it’s a fight, then I’m the troublemaker he told them I was, and he gets to keep being right.” “Wait. Please. Let me think.”
Dale looked at me a good while. Then he got up and filled the coffee maker for the morning.
Mom cannot hear on a telephone anymore. Her hearing aids whistle against the receiver, and she says “What?” until she gets embarrassed and hangs up. There was no line in her room for that very reason.
I went to the front door three more Sundays, and it was the same girl, the same page, and the same sorry.
There is a notice on the wall by the front door of every such home, with an address for the state long-term care ombudsman. I wrote to that office the same week, two pages. A kind woman telephoned me back. She said a resident who has her wits about her has a say in who comes to see her, agent or no agent. She said she would open a file, and that somebody could come out and talk to my mother in three or four weeks.
I told her to go ahead. But my mother was eighty-six, and three or four weeks is a long time at eighty-six.
She was sharp as a tack, too, and when a daughter who comes every Sunday stops coming, somebody has to tell the mother why.
I found out later what she was told. Keith said on a call to the front desk that Sue was busy this summer. By the time it got to room 114, it was that Sue was not able to come anymore.
On the third of those Sundays I stood on the mat outside the glass doors with a jar of chokecherry jelly in my purse, and for the first time I read what was taped to the door.
Now hiring. Dietary aides. All shifts. $15.50 an hour. Apply within.
It was taped to the same door I could not walk through.
Then I looked through the glass, down the hall, to where a woman in a maroon uniform was pushing a tall steel cart of trays. She stopped at a door, knocked, and went in. She came out and went into the next one.
Nobody stopped her. Nobody ran a finger down a page.
School was out until the middle of August.
I went back in and asked Tammy for an application. She gave me one on a clipboard. “Bev does the hiring for dietary,” she said. “She’s in at five tomorrow.”
I filled it out in the truck.
I want it understood that I did not lie on that form.
I put my right name on it, the married one I have signed for thirty-three years, which is not my mother’s. I put down the school and my nineteen years. The form asked whether I could lift forty pounds and whether I had ever been convicted of a crime. It did not ask whether I had kin in the building, and nobody in the kitchen office reads the front desk’s list. They are two clipboards at two ends of a long hall.
I knew that, and I let it stand. I told myself I would tell the first person who had a right to ask.
Bev interviewed me Monday afternoon in a little office off the kitchen. She was past sixty, with gray hair cut short and forearms like a woman who has lifted a great many stockpots. She read my application slowly.