The Ramp With Four Names on the Rail

“Now, Charlene,” Kay said, and she turned around to face me for the first time since they had come in the door. “You’re not on there. But you already live here. You’re covered. Nobody’s going to put you out. We all talked about it.”

We all talked about it. That was the part that went into me like a splinter. Not that I was left off a deed.

That three of them had talked about me, and I had not been one of the people in the talking.

“All right,” I said. And I hung the dish towel on the oven door handle, and I asked if anybody wanted more coffee.

I am fifty-two years old. I do part-time bookkeeping for the feed mill outside Rainsville, twenty hours a week, mostly payables and the co-op accounts.

I can do most of it from Mom’s kitchen table on a laptop, and the rest I do on Tuesdays and Thursdays when Mom’s church friend sits with her.

Four years ago Mom fell in the back hall going to let the dog out. She broke her pelvis in two places.

She was seventy-seven, and the orthopedic man in Huntsville told us straight out that a lot of women her age do not walk again after a break like that.

I was living in Gadsden then, in a rented duplex, divorced eleven years with no children and a job at a title company that I did not love.

I gave notice the week she came home from rehab. It did not feel like a sacrifice. It felt like the next thing to do.

Daddy died in 2019. Gene Mott, Sand Mountain born and raised, a man who could build anything with a skill saw and a pencil behind his ear.

He built the back porch and the carport and the shelves in the pantry. If Daddy had been living when Mom fell, she would have had a ramp the next week.

My sisters came when they could. Christmas, Easter, Mother’s Day, Mom’s birthday in August. They called on Sundays. They sent flowers when Mom was in the hospital and Teresa took off a whole week the first winter.

I am not saying they did nothing. I am saying they did what people do who do not live there.

What I did was everything else. The pills in the plastic box with the days on the lids. The bath on a shower chair with the handheld sprayer.

The hair. The toenails. The eye drops, which after the transplant were four different bottles at four different times, written on an index card stuck to the refrigerator.

And the steps. Mom’s house sits up on a block foundation the way a lot of the old houses on Sand Mountain do, and the front porch has four steps down to the yard.

There is no back door that comes out at ground level. Every door in that house has steps.

When Mom first came home in the chair, Daddy’s cousin’s boy put down two sheets of plywood over the front steps for us.

It was steep as a playground slide. The first time I took her down it I had to lean back so hard I thought we would both go over.

After a month the plywood started to bow in the middle. I had it taken up. From then on I took her down the steps backward, one at a time, the way the therapist showed me.

You tip the chair back on its big wheels and you go down ahead of it, step by step, and you hold on and you pray.