The Call Button And The Daughter Who Stayed

My name is Carol Spahr. I am fifty six years old, I have lived in Pendry, Indiana my whole life except for four years at Ball State, and my mother, Ardith, raised me on a hundred and sixty acres east of town where my father, Carl, ran cattle until his heart gave out eleven years ago. My mother is not a complainer. She is a woman who canned her own tomatoes until she was eighty two and apologized to the paramedics for the mess on her kitchen floor the night she fell and broke her hip, the fall that put her in Maple Creek Health and Rehabilitation in the first place, fourteen months before the day I found that cord on the curtain rail.

My father built that farmhouse kitchen table himself out of a walnut tree that came down in a windstorm the year I was born, and my mother fed hired men at that table every summer of my childhood, platters of fried chicken and sliced tomatoes still warm off the vine, never once sitting down herself until every man at that table had a full plate. That is the woman who ended up afraid to ring a bell. The night she fell, she had gotten up at two in the morning to let the dog out, same as she had a thousand nights before, and her hip went out from under her on the kitchen linoleum, and she lay there forty minutes before she could drag the phone down off the counter by its cord. When the paramedics came she asked them to please wipe their boots, because she’d just mopped that floor Tuesday. That is who was lying in that bed reaching for a cord somebody had moved on purpose.

She had been saying for two weeks that she didn’t feel right. Tired in a way that wasn’t like her, and something burning when she went, and I had chalked some of it up to being eighty six and some of it up to the facility being short staffed again, because God knows I had heard that excuse enough times by then to wear a groove in it. What I had not considered, because I did not yet know to consider it, was that an old woman left for days without a way to call for help does not get up to use the call bell for nothing. She gets up for water. She gets up because she is wet and ashamed of it and does not want to lie in it until someone comes on their own schedule. She gets up because her bladder is starting a fight it is going to lose, slowly, from a urinary tract infection that nobody caught because nobody was looking, because the alarm that would have told them was hanging six feet out of her reach.