The Hours The Aide Never Worked

So that is the part of the story I can tell with my head up. The money came back. The agency learned to read its own records. A woman who did a wrong thing had to stand and face it.

But it is not the part that changed me, and it is not the part I lie awake with in the dark.

The part I lie awake with is my mother. Eleven Sundays alone in that house. The one single thing we had paid good money to make certain never happened, happening every week, while I sat at my desk watching the account and seeing nothing at all.

After Dawn was gone and the agency was handled, I sat down with my mother to tell her the truth. I thought I was carrying terrible news in to her.

I sat on the ottoman in front of her chair, and I took both her hands in mine, and I told her that Dawn had not been coming on Sundays, that she had been alone all summer long, and that I was so sorry I had not known.

I braced myself for her to be frightened. I braced for her to cry, or to be angry, or to be shaken to her bones to learn how alone she had really been out here.

My mother did none of those things. My mother looked at me with those pale blue eyes, and she patted the back of my hand the way you comfort a child, and she said a thing I was not ready to hear.

She said, “Honey, I knew Dawn wasn’t coming.”

I said, Mama, you knew, and you never once told me. And she looked at me a long time before she answered, and when she did answer, it took the breath right out of my chest.

She said she had known since the second Sunday. She is old, I will grant you, but she is not simple. An empty house on a Sunday is a loud thing when you have lived your whole life in company.

And I asked her the thing I had to ask, the thing I am still asking in the night. I said, Mama, why in the Lord’s name did you not pick up that phone and call me the first Sunday you found yourself alone.

And instead of answering me straight, my mother told me about the eighth Sunday.

On the eighth Sunday, she said, she had gone down in the kitchen. Reaching for the percolator on the back of the stove, her hip gave out from under her, and she went down onto the linoleum. The very same linoleum I had found her on two winters before.

She lay there, she told me, about two hours. She was not hurt badly, a wrenched shoulder and a bruise that went black and green. But she could not get herself up, and there was not another soul in the house, and the telephone was on the wall clear across the room.

And then, she said, she got herself rolled over onto her knees, and she got one hand up onto the seat of a kitchen chair, and she pulled herself up by that chair an inch at a time until she was standing. And then she put on a long-sleeved blouse so that I would not see the bruise the next time I came. And she said not one word about it to anybody.