The Stairlift She Rode to Her Cake

The Morning She Fell

I heard the thump before daylight, a soft wrong sound from the bottom of the stairs. I was out of bed before I was all the way awake.

Lena was sitting on the third step from the floor with both hands locked on the rail. Her housecoat had come open at the knee. Her glasses sat crooked, and her chin was doing that small tremble it did when she was holding something back.

“I only wanted to start the coffee,” she said. “I did not want to wake anybody.”

She was seventy-nine years old and about ninety pounds of stubborn. She had come down a dark flight of stairs by herself at five in the morning so she would not be a bother to us.

Russ got there a second behind me, barefoot, his work pants already half on. He knelt on the hardwood and put his big hand flat against her back. He did not say a word for a minute. He just steadied her.

I ran my hands down her legs the way the county had trained me to do. No break that I could feel. A knot was already coming up on her hip where she had caught the edge of the tread.

“I am fine,” Lena said. “Help me up, Carol. I am fine.”

She was not fine. Her hands would not stop shaking. When Russ lifted her the little bit it took to get her standing, she sucked in her breath through her teeth.

We got her to the kitchen chair and I put a bag of frozen corn against her hip. Russ started the coffee himself. Outside the window the ridge was going from black to gray, the maples across the holler just starting to show their red.

“You have to holler for us,” I told her. “That is the whole reason you are here. You holler, and one of us comes. That is the deal.”

“I did not want to be any trouble,” she said again. Her voice broke on the last word, and that was the thing that got me.

A grown woman who had raised five sons in a four-room house up a dirt road. A woman who had canned half an acre of green beans every August of her life. Sitting at my table at daybreak apologizing for falling down my stairs.

I had been a home aide for the county eleven years. I had helped more old people up off more floors than I could count. I had learned the hard way that the fall is never the end of it. The fall is the beginning.

That was the morning I stopped waiting on anybody. That was the morning I decided we were getting her off those stairs one way or the other, and that I was done being polite about who was going to help us pay for it.