The next day, before I’d even finished my coffee, the phone rang, and it was a voice I’d never heard in my life, calling from the fourth floor of the very building I’d been walked out of.
“Is this Delia?” she said. “My mother is Eileen Hartmann. Room 412. She’s been asking after you since five this morning and she will not be talked out of it.”
I told her I didn’t work there anymore. She said she knew. She said that was exactly the problem.
The thing I’d carried out of that hospital — the thing I chose not to hand my supervisor — was still in my coat pocket where I’d left it. A little cream-colored envelope. Mrs. Hartmann had pressed it into my hand two nights before, sometime past two in the morning, while I was wiping down her windowsill and she was too full of pain medicine to sleep. “Not here,” she’d told me. “Open it at home.” And then I’d gone and forgotten it the way you forget things when you’re sixty-three and your knees hurt and the next room is waiting.
I sat down at my kitchen table with the phone still in my hand and I opened it.
Fifty dollars, folded once. And on the back of a get-well card somebody else had sent her, in handwriting that kept wandering off the line:
“Delia — you talk to me at two in the morning like I’m still a person and not a chart. Take this, and don’t you dare argue with a dying woman.”
Fifty dollars. The same fifty dollars that went missing off that tray table.
She’d told two nurses she gave it away. Both of them wrote it off as the morphine talking. Nobody thought to check with the woman who cleaned the room, because the woman who cleaned the room wasn’t somebody you checked with. She was somebody you replaced.
Her daughter drove in from Pittsburgh that morning, heard the whole story from her mother, and went straight down the hall to the director’s office. And while she was standing there, somebody pulled the call-light printout for that night. The nurse-call system stamps every light and every clear, right down to the minute. At 11:41 I was in 419, clearing a bathroom call. At 11:44 I was in 417. The exact window I was supposed to be helping myself to a sick woman’s purse, I was two doors down with my hands full of somebody else’s linens.
They asked me to come in Thursday. Open staff meeting, the whole housekeeping department, day shift and night. The director read that note out loud, all of it, in a voice that got thin at the end. The supervisor sat in the second row and studied her shoes. That cheap outside service she wanted so badly never did get its contract.
They gave me my keys back. Gave me something else too — every new hire on nights shadows me for two weeks now, and I get paid for the teaching.
Mrs. Hartmann passed three weeks later. I was on shift. I did 412 last that night, and I took my time.
I keep her card in my purse. Twenty-five years I thought nobody was watching that wing but me. Turns out somebody was watching back — and quiet was never the same thing as having nothing to say.