The Quilt the Administrator Threw Out
Renee Haskell did not stand up when I walked into her office. She did not ask me to sit, either. She kept her eyes on her computer screen and let me stand there on the thin gray carpet like a man come to read the meter.
“There was a survey in September,” she said. “The rooms were cluttered.”
“The quilt was clutter?”
“It was handled.”
“Handled how?”
“I don’t account for every item, Mrs. Mercer. We have twenty-eight residents on two halls and a staff of eleven this week.”
I had been back in Iowa for less than twelve hours. I had buried my Aunt Irene on Saturday morning in a little cemetery outside Fairbury, Nebraska, and I had driven home Sunday night with my feet swollen in my good shoes. At 8:30 Monday morning I walked into Maple Ridge Care Center in Lindell to tell my mother about the service, and her wall was bare.
Not mostly bare. Bare. Seventeen photographs, gone. The little shelf where she kept her church bulletin and her reading glasses, gone. And across the lap of my mother’s wheelchair, where for almost three years there had been a quilt, there was a thin gray blanket with the name of a laundry company stitched into the hem.
My father made that quilt in her room. He had a fingertip missing from an argument with an auger, and he sewed with a thimble on the stub, in the straight chair by her window, three afternoons a week from September to Christmas. He cut it from his own worn-out work shirts and from my mother’s church dresses, which I had brought him out of her closet in a laundry basket. He finished it on Christmas Eve. He died that March.
“Visits will be Sundays, 1 to 2,” Renee said.
“Starting when?”
“Starting today. Your presence has been disruptive to the routine of the building.”
Since my father died I had sat in that building five afternoons a week. I knew the night cooks by name. I knew which aide was going through a divorce. On the first Friday of every month I brought my cousin Darlene in to do my mother’s hair, for free.
I said, “Thank you for telling me.”
That was all I said. I have never raised my voice in a public building in my life, and I was not going to start in front of a woman who could take my mother’s company away with a signature.
I picked up my purse and walked out.
My husband Russ was waiting in the parking lot with the truck running and the heater on. He had not wanted to come in. He said it was my mother and my business, and that a man standing behind a woman in an administrator’s office only made the administrator dig in. He was right. Russ is right about most things that involve other people’s pride.
I got in. I sat there with my purse in my lap.
“Well?” he said.
“One hour on Sundays.”
Russ drove a grain truck for the co-op until his knees quit, and he does not talk when he is angry. He went a full mile before he spoke.