The Inheritance I Had Not Earned
September 17. Lindsey’s wedding. Joyce sat with P. Drove ninety minutes. Saw the vows, cut the cake, left at 4. Missed the first dance. Lindsey said it was fine. It was beautiful. P. had a bad night, glad I was back for it.
He remembered that wedding. He had sat at table six with Renee, watching the band set up, and he had seen his sister kiss her daughter on the cheek and gather her purse and leave at four in the afternoon, before the dancing, before the toast. And he’d said to Renee, not unkindly, “Sandy always did get tired early.” He had said it fondly. He had thought it was a quirk.
At ten, Marcy Jelinek knocked on the kitchen door.
Marcy was our hospice aide for the last two months, a stout, quick woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain and nineteen years in hospice work. She had come to confirm the bed pickup, and because she had not been able to stop thinking about our house all week.
Keith poured her coffee. She sat in my chair and looked at him the way you’d look at a man on a frozen pond who didn’t know it was thin.
“I’m going to tell you something, and you can do what you want with it,” she said. “I have walked into maybe six hundred homes at the end. I have seen exactly three caregivers like your sister. Three, in nineteen years. Do you know that for the last eleven nights she slept on the floor? On a pad, next to his bed, because he panicked when the room went quiet. She held his hand through the rail. Her back was so bad she had to roll to her knees to get up. We had an overnight respite nurse lined up, and she said, No, ma’am, he’ll know it isn’t me.” Marcy let her glasses hang. “I know the good deaths from the hard ones. Your father’s was a good one. He wasn’t afraid. He was clean, and warm, and held. That doesn’t happen by accident. That is a person’s whole self, handed over, one night at a time.”
Keith’s hands, he told me, were flat on the table.
“Joyce called me about what was said in this kitchen yesterday,” Marcy said, standing. “I couldn’t let you drive back to Milwaukee thinking your sister sat in a recliner. She never once sat in that chair, you know. The only time it got used was when you came, so your father would look nice.”
Harlan Pruitt came by at eleven.
Harlan is seventy-four and farms the section east of ours, and he is a man of about forty words a day. He pulled in with a casserole his wife had sent and would not come in. Keith went out and sat beside him on the step, and after a while Harlan spent a good number of his words.
“Last January,” he said. “Twenty below. Two in the morning my phone rings. Your sister says, Harlan, I’m sorry, I hate to ask. Pop’s on the floor and I can’t get him up.”
Keith turned.
“He’d slid out of the chair in a transfer. She’d gotten a quilt under him and a pillow under his head, and she was lying down next to him with her arm around him to keep him warm. She wouldn’t call the ambulance. Said the siren would scare him.” Harlan shook his head. “She lay on that hardwood an hour and ten minutes till I got my boots on.”