The Nurse Who Came Up Mom’s Porch Steps

Why I Didn’t Go After Him

This is the part people do not understand, so I will try to explain it plain.

If I had put that legal pad on my brother’s desk, he would have had an answer. Ferris always has an answer. He sells cars.

He would have said it was a loan. He would have said Agnes was lying. He would have said I never liked him handling the money and was looking for a reason.

And then he would have gone straight to Mom, and Mom would have taken his side.

Not because she did not love me. Because she loved us both. The thing she feared most in this world, more than another fall, more than the care center, was her two children fighting over her.

When Dad was dying, he made her promise she would keep us together. She has kept that promise like a vow at the altar.

Any time Ferris and I have had words in eleven years, she has smoothed it over by deciding he was not so wrong.

If I made it a fight, she would defend him to keep the family whole. She would keep Agnes, to prove she was not choosing sides.

And she would go right on sitting alone at that kitchen table with her walker across the room.

I could not risk that with her hip and her pills. So I decided I would not fight my brother at all.

I would put my mother in the hands she had paid for, and I would let Ferris see it with his own eyes.

Verna

I already knew who I wanted. Verna Kubicek is 79 years old. She was a registered nurse at the hospital in town for forty-one years, most of them on the floor where they put the old people after surgery.

She retired at seventy only because they made her. She still takes blood pressures in the church basement after Mass on the first Sunday of every month.

She and Mom have been friends for fifty years. They met properly in 1976, when Verna’s oldest girl needed a First Communion dress and Mom made it.

But they knew each other long before that, the way everybody knows everybody in Wahoo.

Verna was the skinny fifteen-year-old who ran the pie stand at the 1962 county fair, the summer Mom was twenty. Mom has never once let her forget it.

I called her from my car in the courthouse lot on Monday afternoon. The sun was out, and the snowbanks along the curb were going gray and soft.

She asked right away how Mom was and whether she was walking. I told her not as much as she should be.

Then I told her about the pill box and the walker and the girl who left at ten. I did not tell her about the money.

Verna was quiet on the line. When she spoke again her voice had changed. It was the voice I imagine she used at three in the morning on a hospital floor, telling a frightened family what would happen next.

“How many hours a day does she need?” I told her six hours, six days, and that I would take Sundays. “I can do six,” she said. “I’m old, honey. I’m not dead.”

I told her I wanted to pay her what Mom had set aside, twenty dollars an hour from Mom’s own money. She said I did not have to pay her a thing, because Bozena was her friend.

“She’ll want to pay you,” I said. “You know she will. She wouldn’t take charity from the Pope.” Verna laughed at that and said all right, twenty, and asked when I wanted her.

“Monday at nine,” Verna said, before I could answer. “Tell Bozena to have the coffee on.”