The Nurse Who Came Up Mom’s Porch Steps

Letting Agnes Go

I drove out to the gas station on Wednesday afternoon and found Agnes behind the counter.

I bought a coffee I did not want and waited until the line cleared, and then I told her we had found someone with nursing training.

Her face fell, and then it cleared, and I saw that she was relieved. “I was scared to death the whole time,” she said. “I kept thinking she’d fall and I wouldn’t know what to do.”

I handed her an envelope with a week’s pay in it at twenty dollars an hour, out of my own checking account. I told her it was from me and not my brother, and to put it toward the college.

She did not want to take it, and I made her. She came around the counter and hugged me, and I hugged her back.

She was not the one who had done wrong. She was only the one who had been standing there.

I did not tell Ferris any of it. I told Mom that Agnes had more hours at the station and was going to school, which was true. Mom said good for her, and that was that.

On Saturday Leon went over and spent the whole day at Mom’s.

He put a second grab bar in the bathroom, took the throw rug out of the hall over her objections, and laid grit tape on the back step where she had fallen.

He did not say a word about Ferris. He just worked. When he came home, he told me Mom had made him kolaches. “She’s going to be all right,” he said. “She was humming.”

Monday at Nine

It was the second Monday in March, and the sun came up clear and bright over the elevator on the east side of town.

By eight thirty the snow on the south side of every house was running off the eaves in little bright streams.

I picked Verna up at a quarter to nine. She came down her front walk in her white cardigan and sensible shoes, carrying her old black nurse’s bag.

“I’ve had this bag since 1969,” she said, getting into my car. “It’s been to more deathbeds than the priest. Today it’s going to a living room. I like that better.”

The trees along Mom’s street were still bare, but the buds were fat on the maples and the robins were back, pulling worms out of the soft lawns where the snow had pulled away in patches.

Mom’s house is a small white farmhouse on a big lot at the edge of town.

Dad’s people farmed the ground before the town grew out to meet it. It has a deep front porch with a rocker Dad made the year I was born.

I parked in the drive, and Verna stood a moment looking at the house with her bag in her hand. “Bozena’s porch,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of coffee on that porch.” I told her she would have more.

Then I walked her up Mom’s porch steps. I went first and held the storm door.

Verna came up behind me one step at a time, her hand on the rail and her bag in the other.

Mom was in her chair in the front room, in her soft blue housecoat over a sweater, with her white hair pinned up the way she has worn it every day of my life.

I had told her to expect a visitor, but not who.

She looked up and saw Verna in the doorway, and she put her hand over her mouth. “Verna Kubicek,” she said through her fingers. “You came.”

“Of course I came. Somebody has to keep you in line,” Verna said. “I hear you’ve been skipping your pills.” Mom asked who had told her that, and Verna said a little bird in a camel coat.

Mom looked at me, and I thought she might be angry. Instead her eyes filled up and she held out both her hands, and Verna set down the black bag and went and took them.

“I can’t have you waiting on me,” Mom said. “You’re older than God.”

Verna told her she was 79 and could still lift her, and that since Mom was paying, Mom could not boss her around about it. “I’m on the clock,” she said.