The Nurse Who Waited Thirty Years

Wednesday morning

My brother Zeb came through the door at ten past six, a gym bag on his shoulder and his face gray from sixteen hours of road. He had on the same canvas coat he wore every winter of his life, and it smelled of diesel and coffee.

He stopped at the foot of the bed. He took in me, red-eyed, and Brendan waking groggy in the recliner, and a woman in scrubs with her head on our father’s blanket, who looked up at him as if she had known him all her life.

“Who is that?” he said, low.

“That’s Yvonne,” I said. “Come in the hall.”

I told it in the hallway, and then again to Brendan, who took off his cap and held it against his chest. When I finished, my husband, who does not talk much, walked to the window and stood with his back to us for a while.

“That’s my father-in-law all over,” he said finally, to the glass.

Zeb put his hand on Dad’s forehead. “I’m here, Pop.”

My father opened one eye. “Took you long enough.”

Zeb laughed so hard he had to sit down.

Yvonne’s shift ended at seven. At seven she gave her report to the day nurse and went away.

At a quarter to eight she walked back in wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt, her hair down, a grocery bag in one hand.

“I thought you might not have eaten,” she said.

Cinnamon rolls from the bakery on the corner, still warm, and four paper cups of coffee. I looked at her, a stranger in sneakers with a sack of sweet rolls, and understood she had no intention of leaving.

“I’m off four nights,” she said. “I had them already. I’d like to stay, if you’ll let me.”

It was Zeb who answered. He got up and took the bag out of her hands.

“Pull up a chair, sister,” he said. “Pop’s been telling us for years we ought to have more company.”

Going home

When Dr. Reinholt came by on rounds, Dad asked in a thread of a voice to go home.

She did not say he couldn’t. She pulled her glasses down from her hair and said, “Let me make some phone calls.”

It took a day and a half. By Thursday noon a hospice office in Wendell had a bed waiting for the front room and a nurse who would come twice a day, and a transport ambulance was backed up to the dock. Zeb rode in the ambulance with Dad. I rode up front. Yvonne followed in her little gray Corolla, and Brendan drove ours behind her, up Highway 81 through the milo stubble and the cut soybean fields.

We put my father in the hospital bed by the front window, where he could see across the yard to the barn. Two of the barn cats came in and jumped onto the end of the bed without a bit of shame. The hospice nurse said it was against regulations and let them stay.