The First Chair I Washed Her Hair In

Every Single Day

Let me tell you what every single day actually looks like, so you understand what the lie was built on top of.

My mother, Opal, is eighty-one years old. Two springs ago she started forgetting the stove was on.

Then she started forgetting my brother Jeff’s name, and then mine, though she comes back to me more than anybody.

The doctor in Bedford said the word none of us wanted to say. After that there was no keeping her in the farmhouse alone.

We moved her to the county home out on the state road in March. It is not a fancy place. It is a clean place. The floors are mopped, the sheets are changed, and the woman who runs it, Miss Carol, knows every resident by their first name and their favorite dessert.

I go every day. I have gone every day since March, and that is not a brag, it is just the truth, the kind of truth that does not feel like anything until somebody says the opposite of it out loud in a room full of people.

I go at lunch most days because that is when she eats best, and the aides are stretched thin at lunch. There are supposed to be four of them on that hall and most days there are two.

So I help. I cut her meat into small pieces. I hold the straw to her lips and wait while she remembers how to pull on it.

When the call light has been on down the hall for twenty minutes because Mr. Deppert slid down in his chair again, I go push the button myself and wait with him.

I know every resident on that hall by name. I know Miss Ada takes her coffee light and sweet. I know Mr. Deppert ran a county road crew for thirty years and still salutes the flag by the door.

I know which aide is the kind one and which one is just tired, and I have learned not to hold the tired one’s tiredness against her, because two people cannot be in six rooms at once.

I bring things from home. A quilt for Mama’s feet. A little radio that plays the gospel hour. A jar of the apple butter she used to put up, so she can taste something that is hers.

I am not telling you this to sound like a saint. I am telling you because Renae stood under a dryer and said I had washed my hands, and the plain fact is my hands are in that home up to the elbow five and six days a week.

And here is the part that cut the deepest. Twice a week, when the beautician who used to come around stopped coming because the home could not pay her travel, I started washing and setting Mama’s hair myself.

Right there in her room, with a basin and a pitcher and the rollers I bought at the dollar store in Paoli. Because my mother went eighty years of her life never once letting the world see her with her hair undone, and I was not about to let a thing like a disease take that from her.