The Call Button And The Daughter Who Stayed

An older nurse named Faye, who had worked the floor at Maple Creek for twenty two years, caught me watching the shift board one afternoon and sat down across from me at the little table by the window instead of walking past. “You’re not just visiting,” she said. It wasn’t a question either. I told her what I’d found, and she nodded like she had heard some close version of it before. She explained things to me a daughter has no reason to know going in: that a resident’s call cord is supposed to be checked and repositioned every time an aide finishes turning or changing or bathing them, written right into the state’s own standards, because a resident left lying on her side after a reposition can end up with the cord pinned under her own body or hanging off the far rail without anyone meaning harm at all. “Most of the time it’s an accident,” Faye told me. “Somebody’s in a hurry, they set it down wrong, they don’t go back and check. That’s bad enough on its own. What you’re describing, three days running, in the same spot, on the same resident, after your mother already told somebody about it. That’s not an accident anymore.”

I watched one aide in particular. Her name tag said Brandy, and she was the one my mother had named, the one who’d told her she pushed the button too much. Brandy was not a monster. I want to be fair about this because fair is the only way I know how to tell a story. Brandy was maybe twenty six, moved fast, worked harder in a given hour than most people I know work in three, and she looked like a woman who had not had an easy sleep in longer than she could remember. I later learned, because Jean told me and because I asked around the way you do in a town the size of Pendry, that Brandy was covering two full wings most nights that month because the facility had lost three aides since summer to better pay at the distribution center outside town, and nobody above her had hired to fill the gap.