The Nurse Who Came Up Mom’s Porch Steps

The Thursday slot in my mother’s pill box was still full at a quarter after twelve, and my mother was sitting at her kitchen table in the same chair she had been in since breakfast.

Her walker was across the room by the sink. She had both hands folded on the oilcloth and a cold cup of coffee in front of her.

She smiled at me like I had caught her doing something silly. “Magdalena,” she said. “You’re not supposed to be here. It’s a workday.”

“It’s my lunch hour, Mom. Where’s the girl?” I asked, and she said the girl had errands to run and would be back by three. “She’s a nice girl,” Mom said. “She’s very busy.”

I set my purse on the counter and took the lid off the Thursday morning slot. Her blood thinner was in there. Her pain pill. The big chalky calcium tablet she always complained about.

All three were sitting there just as I had sorted them on Sunday after Mass, waiting for someone to put them in her hand with a glass of water.

I asked her when the girl had left, and she said around ten, maybe a little before.

“And you haven’t been up since?” She looked down at her folded hands. My mother is 84 years old, and she has never in her life liked to be a bother to anybody.

“I didn’t want to bother anybody,” she said. “I thought I’d just wait.”

I did not say anything right away. I brought the walker to her chair and set the brakes, and I helped her up the way the therapist had shown us: nose over toes, push with your arms, not your hip.

I walked behind her down the hall with one hand on the back of her sweater. When she was settled again, I put the pills in her palm and held the glass for her.

Then I made her a ham sandwich and cut it into four triangles the way she used to cut mine. She told me I was going to be late back to work. I told her they could dock me.

She laughed a little at that. Then she ate every bite of the sandwich, and I understood she had been hungry for a while too.

How It Started

Mom broke her hip on the back step two days after New Year’s.

There had been an ice storm the night before, and she went out at eight in the morning to throw bread to the juncos, the way she has every winter morning since I was a girl.

The step was glazed. She went down hard on her right side and lay in the cold for most of an hour, until the man who reads her gas meter happened to come around the house and found her.

They took her to the hospital in Lincoln. The surgeon put in a pin and a plate and told us she was a tough old bird, which she liked.

After that she had ten days at a care center in Fremont, learning to walk again with the walker.

Then came the question of what to do next. The care center wanted to talk about long-term placement, and Mom would not hear a word of it.

“I have a house,” she said. “I have a porch. I have my own bed and my own sewing machine and my own mailbox. I’ll go home, thank you.”

She had money set aside for exactly this. Dad had been careful, and Mom had been more careful.

After he passed eleven years ago, she put a sum in a separate savings account and told both of us it was for when she got old.

“I’m not going to be a burden on either one of you,” she said at the time. “When I need help, I’ll pay for help. Twenty dollars an hour is what a good aide makes around here. I asked.”

She had asked three different women at church whose mothers had help at home, and she had written the numbers on the back of a pattern envelope.

Twenty dollars an hour, for someone who knew what she was doing. Not a dollar less.