The Quilt the Administrator Threw Out
“Why didn’t you tell her to go to blazes?”
“Because Mama has a bed there.”
It was the only thing I knew for certain. Mama’s money was long gone, the farm had paid for her first three years, and what was left was Medicaid. The open Medicaid bed at Maple Ridge was the only one within 52 miles of Lindell. If I made her administrator an enemy, I made an enemy with the keys to my mother’s room and the say over how fast a call light got answered.
“I could call the state,” I said. “It takes weeks. A man comes with a clipboard, he writes it up, it goes in a file. And Mama sits down that hall the whole time.”
“Mm,” Russ said.
“I can’t move her. So I can’t shout.”
He turned onto the gravel road out of town and let the truck coast.
“Then who else did she do this to?” he said.
I looked at him.
“Seventeen pictures and a quilt out of one room,” he said. “Janice, there’s twenty-eight people in that building. You think she did it to your mother and nobody else’s?”
I had been so deep in my own loss that I had not once looked down the hall. That was the whole plan, and it came from a retired grain truck driver in a Chevy with a cracked dash.
The next Sunday I walked into the 200 hall at exactly 1:00.
It is a long hallway with a rail along both sides. Every door had a name card in a plastic holder, and every wall beside every door was bare, with pale squares in the paint where frames had hung and picture hooks with nothing on them.
My mother was in her chair by the window with the gray blanket over her knees. When she saw me, her whole face changed, and I had to stop in the doorway a second.
“Janice,” she said. “Come where I can see you.”
My mother is 84 years old. She taught 4-H for 26 years and ran the county fair quilt table for twelve of them. She does not cry in front of people, and she did not cry then. She held out her good hand, and I took it and sat on the edge of her bed.
I told her about the service, the preacher who got Irene’s middle name wrong and the neighbor who corrected him out loud from the second pew. Mama laughed, a small dry laugh.
“They took your father’s quilt,” she said.
“I know, Mama.”
“I asked a girl what happened to it. She said it was taken care of.” My mother’s thumb moved back and forth along the arm of her chair, the exact place where for almost three years her thumb had moved along a row of stitching. “I told the next one it was a quilt and not a problem. She looked at me like I’d spoken Greek.”
I could not say anything.