The Sunday Mama Came Home

Getting it ready

I spent Thursday night on the phone. I called my supervisor at the agency and set up a start-of-care visit for Monday with one of the other girls, a good nurse named Kim, because you can’t be your own mother’s nurse on paper.

I called the outpatient therapy clinic in town and got Mama on the schedule for Tuesday and Friday afternoons. I called the medical supply in Lebanon and rented a wheelchair for longer distances and bought a shower chair and a raised seat out of my own pocket.

Mama already had a walker from the nursing home, the kind with two front wheels and tennis balls on the back legs. Kaylin had put the tennis balls on herself.

The ramp was the hard part. A new aluminum ramp costs more than I make in two weeks.

But our church keeps a wooden ramp in the shed behind the fellowship hall. The men built it years ago for Brother Hollis after his stroke, and it has been loaned out to half the county since. It comes apart in two sections and bolts to a porch.

I called Ray Dillard, who is a deacon and keeps the shed key. I told him only that Mama was coming home Sunday and needed the ramp up by afternoon.

“Her porch is on the front, isn’t it?” Ray said. “Three steps?”

“Yes sir.”

“Then we’ll need the long section and the landing. Jeff and I can have it up in an hour.”

The Sunday plan

Here is the part I am not proud of, and I will tell it plainly.

Darren and Tonya go to Tonya’s church on Sunday mornings, the big one out on the highway, and they eat at the Mexican place afterward with her sister. They are gone from a quarter after nine until about one o’clock most weeks.

I knew that. I used it.

At ten o’clock Sunday morning, Jeff and Ray backed Ray’s flatbed up to Mama’s front porch and bolted the church ramp to it. Nobody uses the front door out here. Everybody comes and goes through the carport door into the kitchen. I was betting Darren wouldn’t walk around front.

I wasn’t there for that part. I had a client at eight, a diabetic man on the other side of the county who needs his feet checked every Sunday, and I wasn’t going to skip him. So I went to work in my navy scrubs with my old gray cardigan over them, did his feet and his insulin, and drove straight to the nursing home from there.

Jeff texted me a picture at ten forty. The ramp, bolted and level, running up the side of the porch steps. Ray standing on it, bouncing on his heels to test it.

Under the picture Jeff wrote: “Your brother’s feeder is full. Somebody’s been filling it.”

I didn’t know what to make of that. I put my phone in my pocket.

Jeff had to work second shift at the road barn that afternoon, because they were patching potholes before the cold set in. He kissed me in the nursing home parking lot at noon and told me to call him if I needed him.

“You’re sure you don’t want me there?” he asked.

“I’m sure. If there’s two of us, it’s a fight. If it’s just me and Mama, it’s just Mama coming home.”

He thought about that, and nodded, and drove off.