The Hours The Aide Never Worked

My name is Joan. I am sixty-one years old, and for the last two years I have been the one who drives out to the county road every few days to look after my mother.

Her name is Verna. She is eighty-four. She still lives in the farmhouse where I was raised, the one at the end of Pruitt Lane, with the lilac by the porch that my father planted the spring I was born.

I want to say this plainly at the start. I am not a dramatic woman.

I kept the books for a grain elevator for twenty-nine years, and the thing I am good at is numbers that do not add up.

That is the whole story, really. A number that did not add up, and a woman who could not stop looking at it until she understood what it was hiding.

Let me start where it started.

Two winters ago my mother fell in the night getting to the bathroom. She lay on the cold floor until morning, when I let myself in and found her.

She was not badly hurt. A bruised hip, a frightened heart. But I drove home that day and I did not sleep, because I kept seeing that floor.

I still see it. A person can carry a picture like that for the rest of her life, the shape of her own mother on the linoleum in the gray dawn light.

My mother will not leave that house. I have asked. My brother Lonnie has asked. She says she will leave it in a pine box and not one day sooner.

I used to think that was stubbornness. I understand it better now, and I will get to that, but you have to go the long way with me first.

So we did the thing you do when you cannot be there every hour of every day. We hired help.

The agency was called Hearthside Home Helpers, out of the county seat. They sent us a woman named Dawn Mullins, and for most of a year Dawn was an answer to a prayer.

She was maybe thirty-five. Quick, warm, a loud laugh that filled the kitchen. She called my mother Miss Verna and she meant it kindly.

She came four mornings a week and both weekend days. She got my mother up, got her dressed, made her a real breakfast, saw to her pills, and sat with her so she was not alone.

The weekend shifts were the ones that let me breathe. Saturday and Sunday, Dawn was supposed to be out there, and I could stay home with my own husband for once in a long while.

She was good with Mother those first months. I will not pretend she was not. My mother started wearing her good earrings again. She started telling stories at the kitchen table.

Dawn learned how Mother takes her coffee, light and sweet, and how she will not touch a soft-boiled egg but will eat a fried one every day of her life.

Little things. The things that say someone is paying attention. One morning I found the two of them snapping green beans into a bowl, Mother laughing, and I thought, thank God, we did the right thing.

I want to stop here, before I tell you the rest, and say a thing I believe down to the ground.