The Hours The Aide Never Worked

Maybe Mother was confused. She is eighty-four. Maybe Dawn slipped in and out while Mother dozed in her chair. Maybe I had the days turned around in my own head.

So I did what I do. I did not call anyone. I did not accuse anyone. I got a legal pad and I started writing down only what I actually knew for certain.

I knew the agency sent a time sheet with every invoice. A single sheet per week, with the days, the hours in and out, and Dawn’s signature at the bottom of the page.

I had eleven of them, going back to the start of summer, in the folder in my kitchen drawer where I keep all of Mother’s papers. I pulled every one and spread them out.

Eleven Sundays. Every single sheet said the same thing. Arrived 8:00 a.m. Departed 4:00 p.m. Eight hours. Signed, in blue ink, Dawn Mullins.

On paper, Dawn had spent eighty-eight hours with my mother on Sundays that summer. On paper, she had never once missed a day.

But paper is only paper. A signature is a thing a person draws with a pen, and a person can draw a thing that is not true as easily as a thing that is.

I needed to know whether the paper was true, and I am sixty-one and too old to go crouching in bushes to find out. So I started with the people who are simply there.

Across the road from Mother live Lowell and Marie Boyce. They have farmed that ground forty years, and Marie misses nothing that happens on Pruitt Lane, nothing at all.

I drove out on a weekday and had coffee with Marie at her own table, and I asked her, easy as I could make it, whether she ever saw Dawn’s car out on Sundays.

Marie set her cup down slow. She is a careful woman, and she did not want to make trouble for anybody. But she is also an honest one, and I was asking her straight.

“Joan,” she said, “I have not seen that girl’s car out here on a Sunday since back in June. I just figured you all had changed up the schedule on her.”

I asked was she sure. She said she is in and out of that kitchen window all Sunday morning getting her own self ready for Pleasant Grove, and she would surely have seen a car in the drive. There was no car.

I thanked her, and I drove home, and I did not cry and I did not call Dawn and I did not call the agency. Not yet.

I called my cousin Darlene instead, who lives a mile up the road and had dropped in to visit Mother on two of those Sundays over the summer.

Both times, Darlene said, Mother was alone in the house. She had thought it a touch odd and said nothing, because she figured the aide had just run to the store for something.

Now I had neighbors and a cousin. But I am a bookkeeper, and I know that neighbors can be mistaken about a car, and a cousin can come knocking in the one hour an aide stepped out for milk.

I wanted the thing that could not be argued. The thing that does not care how anybody remembers it. And it turned out that thing had been sitting in the agency’s own computer the entire time.