The next morning, before I’d finished my coffee, the phone started ringing, and it wasn’t my phone. It was theirs.
Forty-one calls into that front office between six and noon, and the girl at the desk finally quit writing the messages down and just started a tally on a legal pad. Daughters in Columbus. A son in Arizona who hadn’t been back in four years but knew exactly who bathed his mother’s window sill. The pastor from Zion Lutheran. Two former directors, both retired.
And Mr. Ansel Bickford, ninety-one years old, room 118, who does not use a telephone and cannot get himself down the hall without help, made an aide wheel him to the business office at seven in the morning and refused to leave.
Because the forty dollars was his, and it never went missing at all.
Here’s the piece that manager never bothered to run down, because it would have cost her the answer she wanted. Residents in that home don’t keep cash in a nightstand out of thin air. Every dollar comes out of the resident trust fund, and the business office logs it — date, amount, resident signature or mark, staff witness. It is a state-required ledger and it sits in a locked file eight feet from the desk where she stood accusing me.
Tuesday afternoon, two days before, Mr. Bickford withdrew forty dollars from his account. Signed for it with the shaky B he makes. Witnessed by the activities director.
Then he put it in a card, and he put the card down inside his slipper under the bed, because he has been hiding valuables in his slippers since he was a boy in a house with five brothers, and because he did not want anybody finding it before the twenty-first.
The twenty-first of that month was my twenty-sixth anniversary at that home. He’d been marking it on his wall calendar since January.
The aide found the card when she stripped his bed Friday. The envelope had my name on it, and under my name, in that big careful print old men use when their hands have quit cooperating:
“For Wanda, who turns my lamp off soft so I don’t wake up. Twenty-six years. Buy something for yourself and don’t put it toward a grandchild.”
They asked me to come in Monday. Board room, door open, families invited — and about nineteen of them came and stood along the wall in their coats. The administrator read the trust ledger out loud, and then he read the envelope, and then he apologized to me by name in front of every one of them.
The cheap outside service never got so much as a phone call back. The manager stayed on eleven more days and then she was gone, and nobody made a show of it, and I was glad.
I’ve got my keys again. Mr. Bickford made me promise to spend that forty dollars on myself. I bought good shoes for nights, which he says doesn’t count, and we have been arguing about it since April.
Twenty-six years I thought nobody saw a woman with a mop after midnight. Turns out a whole building was keeping count.