The Aide Who Drove Ludie to the Ocean

On Sunday I texted Roz the picture. She took it to the drugstore in town and printed it four by six, and taped it to the dayroom wall at eye level for the wheelchairs. By Sunday supper, Ludie had told the entire dayroom about the ocean three times.

Mr. Haney asked to hold the photograph. He stood it on his knee and looked at it for twenty minutes, and then he said to nobody in particular, “I haven’t been asked what I want since Eisenhower.”

On Monday afternoon, an hour after I walked out, Roz called me from the parking lot.

“Ludie wants a pencil and a sheet of paper,” she said. “I told her she’s too tired. She said she’d write it with her teeth if she had to.”

“What is she writing?”

“She won’t say.” Roz paused. “Joelle, there’s something else. Marcy’s crying in the med room. She says she only called Lyle because it’s the rule. She didn’t mean for you to be let go.”

“It’s not Marcy’s fault,” I said, and Roz said she had told her so, and she cried harder.

Tuesday morning at ten, Mr. Haney called a special session of the resident council in the dayroom. There are nine members. By ten past, there were fifty-three people in the room, in wheelchairs and walkers and recliners, and the families who had come for visiting day stood along the walls.

Patti Sizemore, whose mother Alma lives in room 9, told me later she had never seen a quieter room. Mr. Haney read the minutes about the Thursday bingo prizes, and then he folded the page in half.

“We are going to talk about wishes,” he said.

He went around the room. Fifty-eight people live at Piney Fork, and every one of them had one. A woman wanted to see her own porch swing. A man wanted to hold a fishing pole. Mrs. Sizemore wanted her old collie, who had been dead for nine years, and she asked if anyone could find her a dog that looked like him.

Patti wrote them all on index cards. By lunchtime she had fifty-eight, and she and Roz taped them to the long corridor wall outside Lyle’s office, one under another, in a column that ran from the door to the floor.

I wish I could ride past the old home place one more time.

I wish I could pet a horse.

I wish somebody would sit with me at the lake.

The staff came next, one at a time, in their scrubs, on their breaks. Marcy signed first, with her eyes red. The cook signed, and the laundry girl, and the two weekend aides, and old Mr. Rakes from maintenance, eleven in all.

The paper asked that Joelle Pruitt be reinstated, and said they would have done the same.

Patti drove the letter to the office of the Boyd’s Ferry Courier. The editor was a woman named Frankie Dillard who had been a skinny girl in the back row of Bus 14 in 1979, and when Patti said the name Ludie Cobb, Frankie stood up from her desk and did not sit down again until Thursday.

I knew none of it. I was sitting on my back steps with a form from the unemployment office, doing my best not to think.

Dee Whitlow called at ten-forty on Tuesday night.

“She’s asking for you,” Dee said. “It’s tonight, Joelle. I’d come now.”

I do not remember the drive. Roz was standing at the side door in the glow of the light, and she did not say anything. She just held the door.