The Quilt the Administrator Threw Out
For three weeks I had wondered what I had said wrong in that office.
“One hour on Sundays,” I said. “She said I was disruptive.”
“Did she give you anything in writing?”
“No.”
“Then she has a problem,” Nadine said, “and it isn’t you.”
When we had settled, she said, “A complaint about one room goes nowhere fast. What works is the residents’ own voice. Every home has a resident council. It’s their meeting, not the administrator’s, and she has to come and answer.”
“My mother is president of the council,” I said.
“Then ask her,” Nadine said. “Not me. Not you. Ask her if she wants to call a meeting.”
I went to my mother on Sunday and told her all of it: Donna and Hal and the Navy cap and the custodian’s brother, and what Nadine had said.
“I ran the 4-H council twenty-six years,” she said. “I knew Robert’s Rules when your father still called them Robert’s Rulers. Write it down, Janice. I’ll sign it.”
“Mama, you don’t have to.”
“Honey, I am 84 years old and I have had a stroke. I have buried a husband and two sisters. There is very little left that a woman with a clipboard can do to me that hasn’t been done.”
She signed the request herself. It took her two minutes with her good hand, and the O in Opal wandered off the line. But it was her name and her own request, and I have it in my Bible today.
Nadine posted the notice that week: Resident Council, Thursday, 2:00, Dayroom. Special agenda: residents’ personal property and visiting rights. She sent a copy to the board chairman of the nonprofit the county had set up to own Maple Ridge, because she was required to, and the board sent its liaison for the quarter, which is how Phil Auker came to be there. Hal knew him from the feed store. Hal swore he had not arranged it.
Then it was Wednesday night, and I was drying the supper dishes, when the phone rang at 9:40.
“Mrs. Mercer, it’s Bonnie Crandall.” She was speaking low, the way you do from a closet. “I have something of your mother’s. I’m not supposed to have it. Could you come to my house tonight? Just you and your husband.”
Russ already had his keys.
Bonnie lived on the west edge of Lindell in a one-story house with a basketball hoop over the garage. She was waiting in the driveway in a barn coat over her scrubs. Her husband sat on the front steps with a cigarette he was not smoking.
She raised the garage door by hand. The space smelled of motor oil and cold cement. There was a chest freezer against one wall, and on top of it, side by side, sat two black contractor bags, one of them cut open down the side and tied closed again with baling twine.