The Call Button And The Daughter Who Stayed
“You want me to go talk to somebody,” he said. It was not quite a question.
“Not yet,” I said. “I want to see what this place actually does, before anybody knows I’m watching.”
Roy is not a man who sits still well. He spent thirty years climbing poles for the co-op before his knees gave out, and his instinct in any crisis is to find the broken part and fix it with his hands. What he did instead, because I asked him to, was drive forty minutes to his cousin Phil’s place that evening. Phil had worked maintenance at a nursing home over in Rushville for nine years before he retired, and Roy wanted to know from somebody who had actually worked inside one of these buildings whether what I had found was ordinary carelessness or something worse. Phil told him what he told him, and it mattered later, but that first night Roy came back and did the other thing I needed from him, which was nothing. He sat in the hard chair by the window, and he let me be the one at the bedside, because he understood without my having to explain it that this was my mother and I needed my hands on this, not his.
The woman down the hall in 114 had a daughter who came every afternoon around four, and on the second day she knocked on the open door and introduced herself as Jean. Her mother, Lois, had been at Maple Creek almost three years, longer than almost anyone on the floor, and Jean had the particular weariness of a woman who has learned a building’s rhythms the hard way.
“I saw the recliner,” Jean said. “You staying?”
“For now.”
“Good,” she said, and something in the way she said it told me this was not her first time hearing about a call button or a wet sheet or a skipped turn that left a resident sore for a week. “You want to know something? I’ve been coming here three years and I quit trusting the notes a long time ago. You want a thing fixed in this place, you have to be in the room when it happens, or you have to make enough people stand in the room with you that they can’t look past all of you at once.”
I did not go looking for trouble those three days. What I did was pay attention, the way you pay attention in your own kitchen when something smells off and you can’t yet say what. I watched the shift change at seven in the morning and three in the afternoon and eleven at night. I watched which aides came in and checked the call buttons without being asked, repositioning the cord onto the rail as naturally as straightening a blanket, and which aides came in, did the minimum the chart required, and left without ever once looking at where that cord had landed.