The Hayride Grandma Asked For

Gail finds out

Gail found out on Tuesday, because of course she did.

She visits every day, and the sign-up sheet was on the bulletin board, and Grandma’s name was the first one on it in those big round letters.

She went straight to Pleas’s office. I wasn’t there, but Dorcas told me later that it lasted twenty minutes and you could hear Gail’s voice from the nurses’ station.

She told him she’d move her mother to another facility. She told him she’d call the state.

Pleas told her what he had told me. Elnora signed it herself. Her doctor approved it. The staff would be there. And if Gail wanted to come along, there was a seat for her.

Gail called him again on Thursday. Same answer. Then on Friday she called me, at twelve fifteen, during my lunch duty in the cafeteria.

I stepped out into the hall by the gym with a whistle still around my neck.

“You went behind my back,” she said. No hello.

“I went to the front office, Gail. With Grandma.”

“She broke her hip, Tonya. I was the one who found her on that kitchen floor. Do you know what that’s like? She was lying there for an hour before I came. She couldn’t even reach the phone. She kept apologizing to me. Apologizing.”

I hadn’t known that part. I stood there in the hallway with kids running past me to recess and I didn’t say anything for a second, because I couldn’t.

“I sat in that emergency room nine hours,” Gail said. Her voice cracked.

“I watched them cut her stockings off. I’m the one who’s there every day. You come twice a week and you want to be the fun one. If she falls, Tonya, that’s on you.”

“Then come ride with us,” I said. “Sit right beside her. Hold on to her yourself.”

There was a long quiet on the line. Then Gail said, “I’m not going to be part of this,” and hung up.

I went back into the cafeteria and opened a little boy’s milk carton for him and couldn’t stop my hands from shaking.

Being scared for somebody isn’t the same thing as deciding they’re done. I knew that. But I lay awake a while that night anyway.