The Ramp With Four Names on the Rail

Mom sat with that. I watched it go across her face, under the shield and the gauze tape and the white hair. She looked older right then than I had ever seen her look, even in the hospital.

“I thought I was signing for all four of you,” she said quietly. “I would never in this world have signed a paper that left one of my girls off. Least of all the one who gives me my baths.”

It came out then. Not all at once, and not neatly, but it came out.

Kay had a friend in Chattanooga, a woman she worked with, whose mother went into a nursing home in Georgia two years ago. The mother ran through her savings in fourteen months.

Then the state put a claim on her house, and when she died the house went to pay the bill instead of to the children.

“She showed me the letter from the state,” Kay said.

“She sat in my office and cried. And I came home and I lay awake and I thought, that is going to be us. That is going to be Mama’s house. And I called Marla at eleven o’clock at night.”

“And I called Teresa,” Marla said. “And we got scared. All three of us. We got on the phone every night for two weeks and we scared each other worse and worse.”

“Why didn’t you call me?” I asked. I did not say it mean. I just wanted to know.

Nobody answered right away. Then Teresa said it, because Teresa has always been the one who says the hard thing at the end of the day.

“Because you would have asked us why you weren’t on it,” she said.

“And we did not have a good answer. We told ourselves you were covered, that you lived here, that nobody would ever put you out. We told ourselves that so we wouldn’t have to say out loud that we left you off.”

“Why did you leave me off?” I asked.

Marla looked at her coffee. “Because Kay read somewhere that it’s better if the person living in the house isn’t on the deed,” she said.

“For Medicaid. Something about it looking like the house was still Mama’s. I don’t even know if that’s right. I don’t know if any of it was right.”

“It wasn’t,” Teresa said. “I asked one of the social workers at my hospital two weeks ago. I couldn’t sleep, so I asked. She said giving the house away like that can make it worse, not better. There’s a five year lookback. If Mama needed a nursing home inside five years, the state could count the house as a gift and make her wait longer for help.”

She looked at Mom. “We did it wrong, Mama. We were so scared of losing the house we didn’t even check. And we left Charlene off for nothing.”

They all looked at me then. I think they expected me to finally say all of it.

Four years of baths and drops and steps and holidays where they came for a day and went home. Two Saturdays of the church men building a ramp they had told me to wait on.

“I didn’t build that ramp to shame you,” I said.

“I built it because Mama was going down four steps backward every Thursday with her eye taped shut, and I couldn’t stand it one more week. I put your names on it because it’s your mama’s house. That’s all.”

“Charlene,” Marla said.

“I’m not mad about the house,” I said.