In 2019 I had reported a family for stealing pills from an elderly patient, and nobody believed me, and the agency put me on probation and I nearly lost my license. That patient, Mr. Briggs told me, was his brother Harold. And the family I reported was his own.
I could not move. Behind the complaint was a second page, a pharmacy log from this month, thirty oxycodone tablets, picked up with a signature that was not mine.
Read the name, June, he said. Then open the door and read it out loud.
The name on the pickup was Cheryl. His own daughter. The thirty tablets his children were accusing me of stealing had been signed out by the very people pounding on the door.
They had framed a home aide in 2019 to cover their own theft, and five years later they were doing it again, to the same aide, at another deathbed.
I opened the door, and I read the name out loud, and I held up the pharmacy log so Cheryl and both her brothers could see it. The sheriff they had called on me got a very different visit than the one they had planned.
Mr. Briggs, the meanest man I ever took care of, had spent his last strength clearing the name of the woman who brought him his breakfast for five years. The five thousand dollars on my windshield in 2022, when my husband had his stroke, had been him too. He never could say a kind thing out loud. He just did them and growled.
He passed two days later. He left his four thousand acres split in ways his children did not expect, and he left me enough to pay for my husbands care, and a letter that said only, You kept coming. Nobody else did. I kept that letter. From the meanest man in Montana, it was the kindest thing anybody ever wrote me.