My Son's Wife Empties Bedpans — Part 3
The last page of the application was the one Eleanor sealed herself. What she wrote on it does not undo the birthday party.
The personal statement was one page, filled front to back in Eleanor’s slanted hand.
Thirty-one years with the school district, written out with the full title.
Choir, forty years, including the two she directed.
A paragraph about keeping a certain kind of house, and a sentence about how she had never in her life asked anybody for anything.
Near the bottom, the line Marisol had expected.
I do not intend to be a burden to my son.
Then a gap, and then two lines in different ink, pressed harder, slanting down the way handwriting does when somebody comes back to a page later at night.
My daughter-in-law is a nurse.
She is the only one who knows what I take.
Marisol read it twice.
Then she turned to the front of the file, to the box marked NEXT OF KIN, where she had expected Maricel R. again.
Marisol Reyes.
Spelled out. Both names.
The way it read on her license.
In fourteen pages, it was the only place the name was right.
Claudia handed her a tissue from the drawer without saying anything about it.
“She wrote that in March,” Marisol said.
“April, by the ink. People add to these.”
“She’s never said any of it out loud.”
“No,” Claudia said. “They usually don’t.”
Marisol sat in the parking lot for eleven minutes before she started the car.
Friday, 6:20 in the evening, Eleanor already knew.
Claudia had called her at four.
She was standing at the counter with her back to the door, drying a pan that was already dry.
“You told them.”
“They asked. I answered.”
“You could have said what I put on the form.”
“I could have.”
Marisol set her keys down.
“And the first night you stood up at two in the morning in a building with nobody on the hall, I’d have been the one who signed that you were fine.”
The pan went into the rack.
“It’s the other building, Marisol.”
“It’s the second floor. There’s a window over the garden.”
“It’s the other building.”
“It’s a building with a nurse on the hall,” Marisol said. “That’s the whole difference.”
“That is not the whole difference and you know it.”
Eleanor folded the towel in thirds, the way she folded everything.
“Dorothy’s daughter got a garden unit two years ago,” she said. “I sat in that woman’s kitchen and let her tell me about the patio.”
“I know.”
“And now I have to call her.”
She did not cry. She hung the towel on the handle of the stove and squared it.
Dean was in the doorway again.
“I’ll call her,” he said.
“You will not,” Eleanor said.
“I said it. I’ll unsay it.”
Joan told Marisol afterward how it went.
Eleanor stood at the mirror by the coat closet for a good ten minutes on Saturday morning, working out the sentence.
Then she went to the bridge group and used it on the first hand.
“I’ll be at Willow Court in November. Second floor.”
Somebody asked about Cedar House.
“It wasn’t suitable,” Eleanor said, and dealt.
Joan said it was the only true thing she had ever heard her sister say in front of four other women.
The garden units went to the next two names on the list in October.
Eleanor moved in on a Tuesday in November, which she said she had not chosen and which everybody knew she had.
She asked Marisol to walk her in.
The hallway smelled like coffee and floor wax.
There was a nurse at the desk who said good afternoon to Eleanor by name, because Claudia had written it on the board that morning.
The room had a bed, a chair Eleanor had argued for, and a window that faced east.
Eleanor stood at it for a while with her purse still over her arm.
The bench was down there, under a bare tree, with an old man sitting on it in a coat.
Marisol watched her count the floors down to the ground, the way people do in a new room.
There was no loading dock in any direction. There was a path, and a feeder on a pole, and a woman in a raincoat walking a small dog along the fence.
“It isn’t the garden units.”
“No,” Marisol said.
“They’re smaller than the brochure.”
“Yes.”
Eleanor put her purse on the bed.
“Well,” she said. “The light’s all right.”
Dean started calling his mother on Sunday evenings at seven.
He did not apologize for his wife on any of those calls, and after a while there was nothing to apologize for, which is a different thing.
Joan came on Wednesdays with a fruit salad that nobody in the family had ever been able to finish, and the two sisters fought about a chair in the dayroom that Joan said faced the wrong way.
In February, Lia asked her mother the same question she had asked on the stairs.
Marisol said that Grandma had learned it late, and Lia said that was what she thought, and went back to her homework.
Dot Hanley sent a card at Christmas addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Dean Prentice, and underneath, in smaller writing, to Marisol.
It was not much of a correction. It was one more than the year before.
Claudia Barnhart called in March and asked Marisol to speak for ten minutes at a family orientation, to the people who come in with a folder and no idea what any of it means.
Marisol said yes, and wore the cardigan, and went ten minutes over.
She came on Sundays after her Saturday night shift.
She came in scrubs, because there was no point in changing, and with pancit in the blue-lidded container that had held a four-ninety-nine lemon cake.
It went on the middle table in the dayroom.
Not the folding table by the washer. The middle one, with the chairs around it.
By spring the aides knew which Sunday it was by the smell in the east hallway, and a woman from 214 who had never eaten a noodle in her life had opinions about it.
Eleanor took a plate every week and never once said it was good.
She said the noodles were too soft, or that there was too much lemon, or that Marisol worked too many nights to be cooking for a building.
Then she ate all of it and put her fork down.
What she said, once the dayroom had filled up, was, “There’s more in the kitchen, if anybody wants it.”
Which, from her, was the same sentence.
On a Sunday in April, a new resident came down the hall with her son and her son’s wife and that look people have on the first day.
Eleanor got up off the chair that faced the right way.
“Hello. I’m Eleanor Prentice.”
“I’m on this floor.”
She put her hand out, and then she turned halfway and did the thing she had done in front of forty people a year before.
She pointed with her cup.
“This is Marisol.”
A beat, while the room waited for the rest of it.
“She’s my son’s wife.”
The new woman asked what she did.
“She’s a nurse,” Eleanor said.
Then, as if she had been holding it back and got tired of holding it:
“She’s the charge nurse. Nights.”
The new woman said something admiring, and her son shook Marisol’s hand, and the whole thing lasted about forty seconds.
Joan swore afterward that she had heard her sister practicing it in her room that morning, out loud, twice.
Marisol decided she could live with that.
A woman who rehearses a sentence has at least decided which one she wants to be caught saying.
When they had gone on down the hall, Eleanor sat back down and looked at the plate in front of her.
“That cardigan is too thin for this hallway,” she said. “You’ll catch something.”
“I work in a hospital.”
“That’s how you catch things.”
Marisol started clearing the table.
Eleanor waited until her back was turned.
Then she reached over, took the container with the blue lid, and moved it to the middle, where the next person could reach it.
The clock by the dayroom door said 2:41.
Marisol snapped the lid on, put it under her arm, and went down the east hallway toward the stairs.
Out the window at the end of it, the bench under the tree had somebody on it, and the sun on the path was the flat gold it gets in the afternoon.
She had a shift at seven.
In the elevator she caught herself doing the arithmetic she did every Sunday now, the way she used to do it with the pill organizer.
Six days until the next one.
She went home to sleep.
If you had been standing in that doorway with a tray in your hands, would you have leaned over and told her who the woman by the kitchen door was?
This story is fiction. The characters, the community, and the events in it were invented for this page, and any resemblance to real people or places is coincidental.