The Sunday Mama Came Home

“When can I go home, Darren?”

Mama asked it from the bed by the window in Room 114, with her hands folded on the thin blanket the way she used to fold them on the church pew.

My brother didn’t look at her when he answered. He looked at the television bolted to the wall, which was playing a cooking show with the sound off.

“Just till it heals, Mama. That’s all this is. Just till that hip heals up.”

It was the fourth Sunday in a row I had heard him say it. Same words, same tone, the way you’d tell a child the shot won’t hurt.

Mama nodded. She was seventy-eight years old, and she had run the kitchen at the county elementary school for thirty-one years. She knew when somebody was feeding her something.

“Is anybody filling my hummingbird feeder?” she asked.

“Mama, the hummingbirds are gone,” Darren said. “It’s October.”

“Not all of them. There’s always stragglers. You keep it up two weeks after the last one.”

He said he’d look into it. Then he said he had to get going, kissed her on the forehead, and walked out into the hall. I followed him.

I caught up with him by the nurses’ station, where a young aide named Kaylin was sorting the afternoon pills into little paper cups. Darren had his truck keys already in his hand.

“Darren, the therapist told me Thursday she’s ready to go home with help. She’s walking forty feet on the walker. Why is she still here?”

He rubbed the back of his neck. My brother is fifty years old, built square like our daddy was, with his hair buzzed down gray because he says it’s cheaper than a barber every two weeks.

“There’s nobody out there to take care of her, Mel. You work. I’ve got the boys. She can’t be out on that place by herself.”

“She wouldn’t be by herself. I told you I’d stay with her.”

“You’ve got your own clients.” He stepped around me. “It’s handled. Quit worrying.”

He was gone through the double doors before I could say anything else. Kaylin looked up at me from her pill cups, and then she looked down again, the way young people do when they know something and are deciding whether it is their place.

“Ma’am,” she said, very quietly. “Did you know they told the social worker there wasn’t a safe place for her to go?”

I said I didn’t know that.

“Mrs. Hardin’s been cleared to go home for two weeks,” Kaylin said. “The family keeps saying there’s nobody at the house.” She bit her lip. “But my cousin lives out on Pruitt Road. She says there’s people at the house.”

The house on Pruitt Road

My name is Melissa Hardin. I am forty-seven, and I have been a home health aide for nineteen years, which means I spend my days in other people’s mothers’ houses, helping them stay there.

I know what a safe discharge looks like. I have set up a hundred of them. A walker, a raised toilet seat, a shower chair, grab bars, a ramp if there are steps, and somebody close by who answers the phone.

Mama’s house had three porch steps and no ramp. That was true. But everything else on that list I could have had in place in a weekend, and Darren knew it.

I drove out Pruitt Road that same afternoon. Mama’s place sits on five acres about four miles outside of town, a little white farmhouse with a green metal roof that Daddy put on himself the summer I turned twelve.

I didn’t pull in. I slowed down on the gravel shoulder across the road and just looked.

Darren’s blue pickup was parked under the carport. Tonya’s car was beside it. There were two bicycles leaned against the well house, and a basketball goal on a weighted base stood at the end of the drive, where Mama used to park her Buick.

There was a trampoline in the side yard where Mama’s tomato rows used to be. The tomatoes were done for the year anyway, but still. It hit me low in the stomach.

And on the porch, hanging from its hook under the eave, was Mama’s red hummingbird feeder. I couldn’t tell from the road whether it was full or empty.

I sat there with my engine running for a long time.