The Wheelchair They Took Away

When Glenn was settled in the kitchen chair, he buttoned the cuff on his left sleeve, which had come undone in the slide. He did it with the fingers of his right hand, slowly, in front of two strangers who had come to take his legs out of his living room. Then he looked up at them.

“Thank you, boys,” he said. “Mind the doorframe. Jackie just painted it.”

They minded the doorframe. I will give them that. They took the chair out over the threshold with its footplates tilted up, so as not to scrape, and down the ramp Don Ebersole built for us two winters ago, and I stood on my own porch and watched them lift it into the back of a white van that had nothing written on the side. The skinny one shut the doors very gently, the way you close a door on a sleeping baby.

“Ma’am,” he said to me, and he did not say anything else.

I went inside and called the store.

A girl answered and put me on hold, and I listened to a song about a summer I did not remember for six minutes. Then a man’s voice came on, brisk, a little out of breath.

“This is Bruce.”

“Mr. Yarrow, this is Jacqueline Pickett. Your men just carried my husband’s wheelchair out of my house.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m aware.”

“I paid the $40 yesterday morning. I stood at your counter and a young woman gave me this receipt.”

“And I’m showing the payment came in Wednesday, and it was due Monday. The retrieval order was cut Tuesday morning. Once an order is cut, it goes through. That’s the system. I can’t pull a truck back.”

“It was three days. Three days, Mr. Yarrow. I took him to the neurologist in Des Moines on Monday, ninety minutes each way.”

I heard him typing. “I understand, Mrs. Pickett. There’s also a missed one in April in the notes. Here’s what I can do. You bring in the $40, a $75 reinstatement fee, and a $60 retrieval charge, that’s $175, and the unit goes back out on the next available delivery day. That’s Tuesday.”

“Tuesday.”

“It’s the soonest.”

I closed my eyes. I thought of the commode chair that lives in our hall closet, which Glenn had not needed in more than a year because of the power chair. I thought about the bathroom doorway, twenty-eight inches wide, and the kitchen chair that would not fit through it.

“Mr. Yarrow, my husband is disabled. He can’t stand. He is sitting in a kitchen chair.”

“I understand, ma’am. I’d suggest a family member. A neighbor, maybe, to assist him until Tuesday.”

“He is not going to have a neighbor carry him to the toilet.”

“Ma’am, I’m sympathetic. I truly am. But I’m one of forty-one managers in this district, and if I make an exception for you, I make it for everybody, and by Friday I have no chairs at all. Policy is policy.”

I said, “That is a person you are talking about.”

“Mrs. Pickett.”

“Not a chair.”

“Policy is policy,” he said. “Thank you for calling.”

And the line went dead. I held the phone against my ear a good while after that, listening to nothing. It was a very short call. I have thought since about how little it cost him.

I should say how we came to have that chair, because it matters.