The Neighbors Who Filled My Kitchen Table

The man from the state called on a Tuesday at 4:15 in the afternoon, right when the light comes low across my kitchen floor and I start thinking about supper.

“Mrs. Halvorsen? This is Wes Whitaker, with Adult Protective Services. We received a report about you.”

“A report of what?”

“That you are no longer able to care for yourself.”

I stood there with the phone cord stretched across the counter. I still have a phone on the wall, with a cord. Wallace put it up in 1979.

I looked at my kitchen. Clean counters. Bread rising under a dish towel. The checkbook in its drawer. A pill organizer filled on Sunday, with Tuesday’s slot already empty, because I take my pills with my coffee like a person with sense.

I am 78 years old. The week before, I had driven myself forty miles to Norfolk to have my eyes checked, and I had driven my neighbor Opal there too, because she can’t see the road anymore.

“Who made the report?” I asked.

“I can’t tell you that, ma’am. Reports are confidential.”

“You don’t have to,” I said.

He was a polite man, you could hear it. He said he could come out Thursday or Friday, that I was welcome to have someone with me, and that I was not required to let him in but he hoped I would.

“Thursday,” I said, before he finished the sentence. “Nine o’clock. I’ll have the coffee on.”

When I hung up, I did not cry and I did not call my son. I put both hands flat on the counter and breathed until my knees stopped feeling like water.

Then I made a list. Wallace taught me that. When something falls on you, do not stare at it. Make a list.

What I already knew

I did not need the confidential part. I had known since Tuesday supper, and truthfully I had known since September.

My son Zane is 51. He hauls grain and cattle for the co-op out of Norfolk, long runs to Kansas and Colorado and out past Ogallala, gone four days a week and home Fridays. He is a good man. He is a quiet man, which is a different thing, and the two get mistaken for each other.

His wife, Tricia, is 47 and runs the front desk at a dental office in Wakeley. My place is four miles out of town, a white house and a red barn that has not held an animal since Wallace died. I rent the 120 acres to the Upton brothers at $210 an acre. That rent and my Social Security are what I live on. It is not a rich woman’s income. It is a careful woman’s. I have $142,000 saved at the Platte Valley Bank, and Tricia knows it. I told her myself, years ago, when I thought she was family and not a calculator.

In September she came out on a Thursday with a pan of scalloped potatoes and a manila folder.

She set the potatoes on the stove. Then she set the folder on the table, and I saw a power of attorney, already typed, with a yellow flag stuck where my name went.

“Everybody signs one of these, Irene,” she said. “It’s just so Zane and I can help if something happens. It doesn’t change anything.”

“It changes who can write checks on my money.”

“Only if you can’t.”

“Who decides if I can’t?”

She smiled, and I watched the smile go flat around the edges. “Nobody has to decide anything. It’s just paper.”