My Son's Wife Empties Bedpans — Part 2
Eleanor found out who the woman by the kitchen door was. Four days later, someone had to answer two ordinary questions about her, honestly.
At 4:14, Eleanor crossed her own living room faster than she had moved in a year.
She arrived at the chair by the kitchen door with her hand already out.
“I don’t believe we’ve—”
“Claudia Barnhart.”
The woman stood up and shook it.
“Happy birthday, Mrs. Prentice. Thank you for the invitation.”
Ten minutes earlier, the same room had heard the speech about the garden units and the three-year list.
It took them about four seconds.
Dot Hanley set her glass down on the mantel.
The late cousin looked at his shoes.
Dean stood up off the arm of the couch.
Joan did not move at all.
She had been waiting sixty-seven years for a room to go quiet on her sister, and she was not going to spoil it by helping.
From the third stair, Lia asked, in the clear voice of a child who has been waiting an hour for an answer, whether they were going to open presents.
Nobody heard her.
Eleanor’s face did something complicated and then settled.
“Well,” she said. “You should have said.”
“I did try, at the door.”
“It’s a full house.”
“It’s a lovely party.”
At 4:20, Eleanor turned around and found Marisol at the edge of the room with an empty tray.
“Marisol, sweetheart.”
The whole room heard it.
It was the first time in eleven years that the name had come out of her mouth in company, and it came out smooth, like something she had been saying all along.
“Would you get Mrs. Barnhart some punch?”
“Thank you,” Claudia said. “I have a plate already.”
She let that sit exactly as long as Eleanor liked to let things sit.
“Mrs. Reyes brought it.”
At 4:31, a neighbor came in late and asked who the young woman in the scrubs was.
Eleanor opened her mouth.
“That’s my son’s—”
She stopped.
Her hand went to the collar of her blouse.
“That’s Marisol,” she said. “She’s a nurse.”
Across the room, Joan picked her cup back up off the mantel.
Joan found Marisol at the sink with her hands in the ambrosia bowl.
“She practices those, you know.”
“I know.”
“At the mirror by the coats. Been doing it since she was nineteen years old.”
Joan pulled the blue lid off the grocery-store cake, cut herself a piece, and ate it standing up at the counter.
“Lemon,” she said. “Four ninety-nine at the market on Route 9.”
She pointed the fork at the ham.
“It’s the best thing on that table and nobody’s touched it.”
At 4:40, the kitchen door swung shut and it was the two of them.
“You knew who she was.”
“Yes.”
“You stood there and let me—”
“You told me to take her cake and put it in the back.”
Eleanor’s chin came up.
“That is not what I asked you.”
“It’s what you said.”
“You could have leaned over. Two words.”
“I brought her a plate. That’s what I did with my two words.”
“Do you have any idea what you’ve cost me?”
Marisol dried her hands.
“I signed page fourteen of that application in March,” she said. “You’ve never once asked me what I do all night.”
“I know what you do.”
“Say it, then.”
Eleanor did not.
The door swung.
Dean stood in it with his hand still on the wood.
“Mom.”
“Don’t you start.”
“Say her name.”
“I have said her name, I said it not five minutes ago in front of—”
“In here.”
The refrigerator hummed.
Eleanor looked at the counter, where the pill organizer sat by the coffee maker with Sunday through Saturday printed on the lid.
“Marisol,” she said.
It came out smaller than it had in the living room.
Then, to the window, not to either of them:
“My mother was in that other building.”
“Room 210. Nine months.”
Nobody said anything.
“Her window faced the loading dock,” Eleanor said. “I signed her in on a Tuesday and she asked me every Tuesday after that when I was coming to get her.”
She smoothed the front of her blouse again.
“I am not doing that. I’d rather fall down the stairs in my own hallway.”
Marisol put the towel on the rail.
“You did fall,” she said. “Twice.”
At 5:15, Claudia Barnhart carried her coat out to a gray sedan parked three houses down, because the driveway had been full when she arrived.
Marisol walked her out.
“You’ll get a call Thursday,” Claudia said.
“The clinical review is routine.”
“We do it on every file before a unit is offered.”
“All right.”
“You’re listed as the responsible party.”
“Yes.”
Claudia opened the car door and looked at her over the top of it.
“Then it’s you I’ll be asking.”
The cake stayed on the counter with the lid off and four pieces gone.
Sunday, 7:50 in the evening, Marisol sat at her own kitchen table with the organizer open and seven days of small compartments in front of her.
The blood pressure tablet. The half of the water pill.
The vitamin that Eleanor insisted on and the cardiologist tolerated.
Dean sat down across from her with a dish towel over his shoulder.
“How long have you been doing that?”
“Since the garage.”
He went still.
“May,” she said. “She landed on the step by the freezer.”
“Her hand was bleeding, and she made me stop at the light and put a towel on it so the neighbors wouldn’t see.”
“You never said.”
“She asked me not to.”
Marisol closed Wednesday.
“She asked me for two things in eleven years,” she said. “That, and a signature.”
Dean sat with the towel on his shoulder for a while.
“Thursday,” he said. “Do you want me to call in?”
“No.”
“Marisol.”
“She listed me,” she said. “So it’s me.”
Thursday, 9:05 in the morning, in an office with a view of a courtyard and a folder squared up on the desk.
Claudia Barnhart had reading glasses and a pen she did not use much.
“This is the same review we do on everyone,” she said. “I’ll ask, you answer, and I write down what you say.”
“All right.”
“Has Mrs. Prentice had any falls in the last twelve months?”
The clock over the door was the kind they put in school hallways.
Marisol thought about the orange chair in the emergency department.
She thought about a woman in a hospital gown holding a dish towel and saying, don’t tell my son, he worries.
“Two,” she said.
The pen moved.
“Dates, if you have them.”
“May eleventh. August second.”
“Both times I drove her. Both times we were seen and released.”
“And does she manage her own medications independently?”
“No.”
“Who manages them?”
“I do. Every Sunday.”
“Seven days, four times a day.”
“Since when?”
“Since May.”
Claudia wrote for a moment and then put the pen down.
“Thank you.”
“She’s going to say I did this.”
“She might.”
“Is that it, then?”
Claudia turned the folder so that neither of them was looking at it straight on.
“Cedar House is independent living,” she said.
“There’s no nursing staff in those units at night.”
“A resident who has fallen twice and doesn’t manage her own medications can’t go in one.”
“I couldn’t have put her there even if the file had come to me clean.”
“And now?”
“Willow Court has an opening on the second floor. Assisted.”
“There’s a nurse on the hall, and someone brings the medications at eight and at eight.”
Marisol looked at her hands.
“She’s going to hear that building and stop listening.”
“They usually do.”
“There were two garden units.”
“They’ll go to the next two names on the list.”
“That part isn’t a punishment, Mrs. Reyes. It’s just the list.”
The courtyard had a bird feeder in it and nothing at the feeder.
“I’ve been doing this nineteen years,” Claudia said. “I don’t decide anything at a birthday party.”
“I didn’t think you did.”
“I know. That’s why I’m telling you.”
Marisol sat forward.
“Can I ask you something for her?”
“Go ahead.”
“The room on the second floor. Which way does the window face?”
Claudia looked at her for a second longer than the question needed.
Then she pulled a sheet out of the folder and read it.
“East,” she said. “Over the garden and the walking path.”
“There’s a bench under it.”
“Not the loading dock.”
“We don’t have one.”
Marisol let out a breath she had been holding since Saturday.
“Thank you.”
Marisol put the strap of her bag over her shoulder and thought about how she was going to say the words Willow Court in a kitchen on Sunday.
She reached for her bag.
“Mrs. Reyes.”
Claudia had her hand flat on the folder.
“There’s a page in here you didn’t fill out.”
Marisol stopped.
“The personal statement.”
“I’d like you to read it before she tells you what’s on it.”
“That’s hers. She sealed it herself.”
“I called her at eight this morning and asked for her permission to show you.”
Marisol looked at the folder.
“What did she say?”
Claudia turned it around.
“She said yes.”
The story continues in Part 3.