Part 3 — The Pink Message
The name on the pink message slip was Daniel Delgado. My son. I read it twice in the bright Arizona sun, because the first time the letters would not stay in order. The admissions director said, “He called on August ninth. He asked what paperwork would be needed to have someone declared unable to manage her affairs. We explained that it takes a physician and a judge, and that is where the call ended.”
Renee made a small noise. She had been holding her glass the whole time, and now she set it on the diaper cake. “Daniel did that for me,” she said. “I told him you were getting worse and that he should be the one to call, because he was the son. I wrote him a script. I wrote down exactly what to ask.”
I turned in my folding chair. My son had come from Tucson that morning to stand at the back of the patio in his good jacket, and I had not looked at him once. Now I did. He did not hide behind anybody. He walked across the patio in front of thirty women and knelt on the flagstones in front of me, a grown man of forty-four, and put both hands over mine.
“Mom, I believed her. She said you were leaving the stove on and calling people by the wrong names. I thought I was saving you. I called because she told me to, and I stopped because the woman at the desk asked me whether I had ever actually seen you forget anything. I had to say no. I should have come that day. I have been ashamed ever since.”
I looked at my son for a long time. I had watched too many families in the emergency room to think that love and foolishness never share a chair. I put one hand on his gray head and said, “You asked the right question. You only asked it of the wrong person.” Then, because I am who I am, I added, “Get up, Daniel, your knees are old.” Somebody on the patio laughed, and this time it was a kind laugh.
Delia, my old charge nurse, stood up to say what the rest of us needed to hear. In Arizona, the courts do not declare anyone unable to manage her affairs on the word of a relative. A physician must examine the person and a judge must hear the case. No such petition had ever been filed. The only thing that had been put out in public was a page on the internet, and the law has a name for collecting money for a medical need that does not exist.
Vince had not gone far. He was sitting in his truck at the end of the driveway when a deputy of Yuma County, called by Ariana, pulled up behind him. He was asked politely to step out, and he did. He had counted twenties on a coffee table, and nothing he could say would put them back. The page, the list of donors and the deposits told the rest, and the screenshots I had sealed in the Ziploc bag under the tamales were the first exhibit.
The fund page was taken down by the platform within a day, and a refund went to every one of the four hundred donors, with an apology signed by the company. The $28,600 had been spent in part, so the court ordered Renee and Vince to make up the difference over time. The rest came from the sale of the truck of Vince and a deposit on a trip to Cabo that the airline refunded when the facts were explained to it.
Renee pleaded guilty to charity fraud, the lesser counts being dropped because she gave a full statement. The judge sentenced her to probation, two hundred hours of public service, and an order to repay every donor. Vince pleaded to theft and received a short jail term and a longer period of supervision. Renee asked to speak. She told the court she had said the words my mother is losing her mind so many times that she had begun to believe them, and she asked for the chance to say true ones.
The admissions director, whose name is Lourdes, telephoned me the following week. “Margie, we do need a nurse. Not a resident. A volunteer who knows how to sit with someone at three in the morning.” I started in January, two nights a month, in a cardigan and my old badge clip. The residents call me Miss Margie, and I do the crossword aloud with a lady who was a bookkeeper, in pen.
A woman who has spent thirty-four years in an emergency room can always tell the difference between being forgotten and being erased. I remember everything. I remember the diaper cake, the bell, the pink slip, the sun on the patio. And I remember that when it mattered, thirty women stood up in a backyard in Somerton and refused to look away.
My son takes me to lunch every second Sunday, and we sit at the same table at the same Mexican place on 32nd Street, where the waitress knows to bring me coffee with no sugar. Ariana brought the baby in March, a girl, and named her Margarita Rose. She said it was after the facility, but I knew better. I held her on my lap in the shade of the patio and did not forget a single thing.