The Hours The Aide Never Worked

Most of the women who do this work are honest. They are worth far more than anyone pays them.

They wash and lift and wipe and sit with the frightened and the dying for wages that would not keep you, and they do it with a tenderness you cannot put on an invoice.

I have met a dozen of them in the time since, and I would hand my mother to almost any of them without a second thought.

So understand me. I am not writing this to make you afraid of aides, or to make you watch some good woman out of the corner of your eye for no reason.

I am writing about one woman, and one summer, and one thing she did that the honest ones would be the first to call by its right name.

The cost of all of it was steep. In-home care always is. Lonnie and I split it down the middle, and Sunday ran the highest, because Sunday was billed at the premium weekend rate.

Sunday was a full-day shift. Eight o’clock in the morning until four in the afternoon. Eight hours. Two hundred and eighty dollars.

That comes to thirty-five dollars an hour, which for a Sunday, holidays and all, is a fair wage and an honest number. I never blinked at it. It was the price of knowing someone was in the house.

It came straight out of the account Lonnie and I set up for Mother’s care, on autopay, the way the agency wanted it. Clean, automatic, invisible.

I set the account up myself. I am the one who watches it. And for most of a year, I watched it the way you watch a clock on the wall, which is to say I looked right at it and did not see it.

Here is the thing about being good with numbers, though. Your eye catches a wrong one even when your mind is a thousand miles away. It is not a talent. It is closer to a nervous tic.

It was a Tuesday in late summer. I was paying Mother’s light bill online, and the care account happened to be open in another window, and my eye snagged on the column of Sundays.

Two eighty. Two eighty. Two eighty. Every Sunday, clean as a picket fence, going back and back and back through the whole summer.

And that was correct. That was exactly what we had agreed to. There was nothing wrong with the number itself, not one thing.

What was wrong was something my mother had said to me the Thursday before, and I had let it float right past me.

I had asked her, just making conversation on the phone, what she and Dawn had gotten up to over the past weekend.

And Mother had said, in that light easy way she has, “Oh, I don’t see Dawn on Sundays, honey. Sundays I’m on my own.”

I had not heard it. You do not hear a thing like that when you are not listening for it. I had said something about the weather and moved right along.

But sitting there that Tuesday night with the two eighties marching down the screen, I heard it a week late, and it went through me like cold water poured down my collar.

Sundays I’m on my own.

I told myself there was an explanation. There is almost always an explanation, and most of the time it is dull and innocent and you feel foolish for ever wondering.