The next morning, before I’d finished my coffee, the phone started ringing, and the first one was Charlotte in the business office, and what she said was, Verna, sit down, I have the trust ledger in front of me.
Residents’ money does not live in a nightstand. Most of it lives in a trust account the home holds, and every dollar in and out of it gets written in a book and signed for, because the state audits that book and because it is the only protection an old person has.
Miss Ida in 214 had fifty-five dollars signed out of her trust account on Friday afternoon.
Her son signed the line. He took it to buy her the housecoat she had been asking about, and he brought her the housecoat, and he put the change in her nightstand drawer, and he told her, and by Tuesday she did not remember any of it, because Miss Ida has not reliably remembered a Tuesday since 2019.
There was never any fifty-five dollars missing. There was a withdrawal, a purchase, and a woman with dementia doing exactly what dementia does.
The housekeeping manager had two months in that building and did not walk forty feet to the business office to look in a book that exists precisely for this.
The second call was Miss Ida’s son. He had heard by then, from an aide, and he was so upset he could barely get through it, and he kept saying, she takes care of my mother, she is the one who sits with her.
Then the phone did not stop. Miss Ida’s daughter in Fort Wayne. Then a woman whose father I had cleaned around for four years and who is on the family council. Then two aides from days, calling on their own time.
The families called the administrator, and they did not call to complain about a policy. They called to say a name.
Here is what she did not know about twenty-six years of nights. Old people do not tell you things at two in the afternoon with their children in the room. They tell you at three in the morning when you are wiping down a bathroom and they cannot sleep and they have decided you are safe. I know which one of them is afraid of the dark and which one still talks to a husband who has been gone since 1998 and which one cries after the phone calls.
Their children know that I know. That is why the phone rang all morning.
They asked me back that same afternoon with my years unbroken and paid me for the day. The outside service never came in.
The administrator put a rule in writing that nobody accuses anybody of anything involving resident money until the trust ledger has been pulled, and Charlotte typed it herself and I am told she enjoyed it.
The housekeeping manager apologized in the hallway in front of the night shift. It was short and it was not comfortable and it counted.
Miss Ida wore the housecoat all winter. She told me eleven different times where she got it, and every one of those times it was the first time, and I said it was beautiful every single time, because it was.