The Nurse Who Came Up Mom’s Porch Steps

Ferris and the Checkbook

My brother Ferris is three years older than I am. He is 56 now.

He manages a used car lot out on the highway, a gravel lot with a little white office and a row of pennants that snap in the wind. He has run it for nineteen years.

When Dad died, Mom gave Ferris power of attorney and put his name on her accounts. Nobody asked me about it, and I did not ask to be asked.

Ferris was the son, and he was the one with what Mom called a head for money.

I work in the county recorder’s office at the courthouse. I spend my days with deeds and plats and liens.

But in my mother’s mind, a man who sells cars is a businessman and a woman who files papers is a clerk.

So when Mom came home in the middle of January, Ferris handled the help.

He said he knew a girl who was good and cheap and could come six hours a day, six days a week. He would do the paying and scheduling. I would do Sundays and pills.

It seemed fine. The girl’s name was Agnes. She was 19, she drove a little hatchback with a dented fender, and she was sweet with Mom.

She called her Miss Bozena and turned the radio to the polka hour on Saturday mornings.

What I did not know was that she had never had one hour of training.

She did not know how to help a woman with a new hip out of a chair, or what a blood thinner was for, or why it mattered if you skipped one.

She did not know you never leave a woman eight weeks past a hip fracture alone with her walker across the room.

Nobody had told her any of that, because the man who hired her had not cared to find out.