Skilled Care: a story

This is fiction, 

a story composed of several incidents 

woven into a single narrative.

*   ~   *   ~   *

She'd drawn night duty, or asked for it, which would have been possible, I thought, given her personality. Connie was thorough and a great mom--from as much as I could gain by way of a selfie on her phone she was proud to show. From the shot, I guessed her daughter was maybe going-on 15, and a little bit sweet and innocent.

But if the picture said anything, it told me the two of them, mom and daughter, were a special kind of "together." Somehow, Connie had been able to keep herself straight, upright through years that threatened her as greatly as they had any of the other nurses post-divorce. None of the women I got to know at the Manor didn't love their kids--they all did. But some didn't let that love get in the way of their own understandable wanderings ..

"I don't know where he is," she told me when, gently, I asked one late night about Crystal's father, "and I don't care either." I'd hit the red button late, only because I'd paid for breaking the rules when I tried to get to the bathroom on my own some days earlier and fallen. I needed her to stand beside me with her iron grip on the girdle strap they all used to hold me up.

It was all matter-of-fact with Connie. She was straight-on, didn't try to be pretty. Some still small voice in the not-so-recent past had suggested to her that the time for rouge was some years back. Those years had stretched her nurse's smocks as  tightly over her midsection as her breasts. In only one way was she attractive--I always came away from her late nights with the confidence that she cared for me, deeply and honestly. No small thing.

Several empty rooms around mine meant the nights at the Manor were exceptionally quiet. It seemed to me there was little for Connie to do through late nights and early mornings, but what did I know about nursing?

"And this guy--her father?" I asked her. "What does he do for a living?"

 "I don't know," she said, and then, "It's been, you know, years."

All of that was flatly stated, no spit, no spite. But she pulled up a chair from behind my desk, as if tonight she had the time. "You got a belt, don't you?" she said, and I aimed her at the closet. 

Her daughter's father had wanted them to live in Texas, far away from her father, who needed her. But the guy didn't stay, so she and this little two-year-old headed back up north, alone, to Iowa. And that's the way it stayed.

She told me she'd been gripped by an odd incident when she lived in Texas, when she was trying to sell encyclopedias--that memory loosened a giggle. She'd met a man on a street corner, a man who was wandering. She thinks he had Alzheimer's, some kind of memory issue anyway. It was very difficult, she remembered, just getting his name. "I helped him to find his way home," she said. "I actually got him home."

"Tough?" I said.

She smiled more widely than I thought she could. "That night," she said, "I told myself that someday I wanted to be a nurse." 

There was more to her story than a disappearing Texas dude; others moved in or she moved in with them, two or three maybe I gathered; but none of them lasted. That picture on her phone showed two smiling women, mother and daughter. No one else.

She told me, almost in passing, that there was a woman in there too, in that parade of failures. And there was always her menacing father. 

"My father had PTSD--bad," she told me. 

It was hard for her to sit, so she got up and folded my clothes, laid them on a chair. "The only two things Dad ever seemed to care about was guns and drink." She spent years trying to keep him alive by chasing him down and keeping his room clean. 

"Vietnam vet?" I said, guessing his age.

She said he was never in a war, never in battle at all. In the military though.

"He's gone too?" I said.

She nodded. 

Maybe I went too far. Maybe she wasn't prepared open up to this old guy in skilled care. 

I said, "I'm guessing she's doing well in school--your daughter?"

"Crystal?. . ."

"Yes, Crystal."

"She's does very well." She dropped her shoulders as if for relief. A smile spread over her face. "How'd you know that?"

"I'm an old teacher--it's not hard to spot such things."

"Let's get you up," she said, and she came towards me with that security belt and put it around my neck hung it there before it dropped to my chest. There was only one way to get the job done. When she slipped it over my shoulders carefully, she  came in closer than most people normally do.

"I tell my friends that in a day I get more hugs around here than I get in a year otherwise," I told her.

"Call that 'a hug'?" she said, straightening that thick belt behind my back. 

Once we were ready to go, she shoved the walker into position. I had bare feet, and it was only a week or so since my fall right here at the edge of the bed. I struggled a little, but I hated the humiliation of not being able to stand so it took three thrusts to get my body up on the walker, but I did it. "There," I said. 

She grabbed my shoulders--I was taller than she was--and pulled her face close to mine, and spread her arms around me. Both my hands were on the walker. "That's a hug," she told me when it was through, and off we went to the toilet.

When she left, her silhouette stood against in the open doorways against the lighted hallway. She stopped for just a minute. "If you need me, push the button--I put it up there at the top of the bed."

She wasn't wrong. It was there. I felt it.