The Nurse Who Came Up Mom’s Porch Steps

The Week After

Ferris put $2,300 back into Mom’s account that Friday. I heard later that he sold his bass boat to a man from Ashland, the boat he had wanted since he was twelve and finally bought the year he turned fifty.

He brought the deposit slip to Mom on the porch on Friday afternoon. She handed it to me.

I read the number out loud, and Ferris said, “It was two thousand three hundred and four. I know. The four’s in my pocket.”

He dug in his jeans and laid four one-dollar bills on the arm of the rocker. Mom laughed in spite of herself, and so did I. Then he handed me Dad’s old leather checkbook from the desk drawer.

“You do it,” he said. “You’re better at it than me anyway. You always were. I’ll sign whatever you need at the courthouse. You know where all the papers are.”

I took it and put it in my purse, and I did not make a speech about it.

He did not get off easy, and I want to be clear about that. I did not call anybody. I did not tell the church.

But Leon knew, and Leon stopped taking his pickup to the lot for oil changes. And Verna knew, because Verna is nobody’s fool.

Every Monday after that, when Ferris came up those porch steps with his sack from the café, Verna was sitting there in her white cardigan. She looked at him and said, “Afternoon, Ferris,” and that was all she ever said.

He had to walk past her every week. He had to see what twenty dollars an hour looked like when it went where it was meant to go. That was his sentence, and he served it every Monday until spring.

Verna’s Weeks

Verna came six days a week, nine to three, just like she said, and she did not leave once. She brought her lunch in a paper sack and ate it with Mom at the kitchen table.

She did Mom’s ankle pumps and leg lifts and sit-to-stands. She walked her down the hall, then to the end of the porch, then down the steps and up again on Leon’s grit tape.

She kept a notebook of blood pressures and distances in neat nurse’s printing.

She did things that were on no list, too. She brought her sewing basket, and the two of them hemmed a stack of pants for Verna’s grandsons.

She brought her old photo album from the 1962 fair, which it turned out she still had.

There in black and white was a skinny girl in a pie apron and, way in the back, blurry, a young woman in a dotted dress standing next to a tall boy with his hat in his hand.

Mom cried when she saw it, and then she laughed.

“You know,” Verna said to me one afternoon in the kitchen while Mom napped, “she was never scared of falling. Not really. She was scared of being alone when she fell. You can’t fix that with a pill box. You fix it with a person.”

By the third week of March, Mom was walking the length of the porch with only a cane and Verna’s arm. By the first of April she was going down the steps on her own.

“I want to walk to the mailbox,” Mom said one morning.

It sits at the end of her drive by the county road, about sixty yards from the porch steps, on a post Dad set himself the year they moved in.

“Not yet,” Verna said. “Soon.” Mom asked when. Verna said when Mom could do it without holding her elbow so tight it left a mark.