The Pencil Marks on My Pantry Door
“I know.”
“I’m not ready to quit, Kim. I’m slow. I’m not done.”
“I know,” she said. “I know it. I saw you out there. You answered him. You said it plain as anything.” She laughed, wet and awful. “You haven’t said a sentence that clean to me since August.”
“You never wait for the end of one.”
That landed. I saw it land.
“No,” she said. “I guess I don’t.”
We sat at that table until past noon. Harriet came back over and cut the apple bars.
It was Ms. Dunning who said the sensible thing, in the end.
“If I may,” she said. “Neither one of you is wrong. Mrs. Weber does not belong in a home. And she should not be alone on a kitchen floor for four hours, ever again. Those are two different problems. Selling this house only solves one of them.”
“The telephone’s on the wall,” I said.
“Then that is the first thing,” Harriet said. “For heaven’s sake, Maxine. I have been telling you for ten years.”
So here is what we did, and it did not take a single lawyer to do it.
The hospital has a program with a button you wear on a cord around your neck. If you fall, you press it, and a voice comes out of a little box and asks if you need help. If you do not answer, they send the rescue squad and then they call your daughter. It costs me thirty-five dollars a month. Kim drove over to the hospital and signed me up that same afternoon.
Harriet and I worked out a signal like two girls at camp. I raise the kitchen shade by seven. If it is not up by half past, she comes over with her key. She does not need the trowel anymore.
And Kim called her brother.
I did not make her. I want that on the record too. She went out and sat in her car in my driveway and called Jeff in Colorado and told him the whole of it herself, the paper and the listing and the fifteen hundred dollars and the young couple. She was out there forty minutes. I watched her through the front window, the one that hangs a quarter inch out of level, and I could see her nodding and wiping her face.
When she came in she said, “He’s driving out Friday. He’s pretty mad at me.”
“He’ll get over it.”
“He said to tell you he’s bringing his tools.”
She called the place in Lincoln and gave up the room. They kept two hundred and fifty dollars of her deposit. She did not complain about it and neither did I. I figured that was about the right price for a lesson, and cheaper than most.
She also brought me that power of attorney paper, the original, and laid it on the table.
“Tear it up if you want,” she said. “I would.”
I looked at it a while. My poor hen-scratch signature at the bottom.
“No,” I said. “Somebody has to be able to pay the light bill. If I go down again.” I pushed it back across to her. “You keep it. But you ask me first. And you wait. For the whole sentence.”
“Yes, ma’am,” my daughter said.
That would be the end, except for Saturday.
Saturday morning at eight o’clock there was a pickup in my alley with a load of treated lumber in the bed. I thought it was Jeff. Jeff was at my kitchen table eating eggs.