The Hours The Aide Never Worked

She opened her mouth. Nothing came out of it.

I turned the next sheet, and the next, laying the paper beside the clock-in record each time, saying the dates soft and even, June, June, July, and letting the quiet do the work for me.

By the fourth sheet she had sat down in the chair. By the sixth she had her hand pressed over her mouth. By the time I reached the last one she was crying, not the pretty kind, the ugly kind that a person cannot stop once it starts.

And then, because I am not made of stone, I put the pencil down and I said, “Dawn. Tell me the truth now. All of it. I will listen.”

And she told me.

I am going to tell you her reason, because it is a real one, and because a real reason is not the same thing as an excuse, and a grown woman knows the difference between the two.

Dawn Mullins has a daughter named Kayla, who was six years old that summer, and Kayla’s kidneys do not work the way yours and mine do.

Three mornings a week, Kayla was on a machine at the children’s hospital an hour and forty minutes away, and the only standing ride that whole family had was through their church.

The church is a little block building called Antioch Full Gospel, out past the stockyards, and those people are poor and they are faithful and they carried that sick child back and forth without ever being asked twice.

The rides, and the childcare for Dawn’s younger one, and the meals when Dawn was up at the hospital overnight, all of it ran through Sunday morning.

Sunday morning was when that whole net of people was gathered in one room and could be leaned on. If Dawn missed church, she missed the ride that week, and the childcare, and the casserole, and the one hour a drowning woman got to set the weight down.

She was a single mother. Kayla’s father was long gone. She was behind on every single thing a person can be behind on, and Hearthside did not pay her enough to ever dig out of it.

And she could not afford to lose the job by refusing the Sunday shift the agency had sold us. So she left the shift on the books, and she spent those mornings at Antioch with her sick child and her people.

She signed the sheets for Sundays she never worked, and she took our two hundred and eighty dollars a week, and she told herself Miss Verna was tough, Miss Verna was fine, and nobody would ever think to check.

“I knew,” she said, through the crying, before I could even say it to her. “I knew every single Sunday. I just could not see another way, and I kept telling myself I would find a way to make it right.”

I sat with that a long moment. I felt for her. I want you to know I felt for her, because the next part is where some people will decide I turned cold.

I did not turn cold. I turned clear.

I told her that I understood her reason and that it did not change one thing about what she had done. She had taken money for care she never gave. And worse than the money, far worse, she had left an old woman alone who could have died on that floor.