The administrator walked in smiling as I stepped through the conference room doors, and the smile came off her face in pieces, because behind me was Ruth Ellen Tacker’s daughter, and behind her was the facility’s own valuables log.
Nobody stole that ring.
Miss Ruth is ninety-four and she has lost forty pounds in two years and that band had been going around on her finger like a curtain ring since Christmas. Her daughter Vonda took it home on the ninth of February to have it sized down, put it in an envelope in her purse, and then her own husband went into the hospital in Rolla the same week and she did not think about that envelope again for a month.
She signed it out. That is the thing that makes me sick when I think about it. She stood at the nurses’ station and signed the belongings log the way the state requires, line 41, date, item, family member’s name, and a nurse initialed it.
That log lives in a binder in the med room. Nobody opened it. The administrator had been there seven months, had never been shown the binder, and did not ask one person where it was before she pointed at me in a lobby full of visitors and said the word police.
Vonda found out from her mother’s roommate’s granddaughter on a Thursday. She drove up from Rolla the next morning with the ring in the envelope and she was so mad she could not sit down.
The board let her speak first. She held up that envelope and read her own signature off a photocopy of line 41 and then she asked the board why a woman who has worked in that building since 1994 could be called a thief in a lobby before anybody thought to look in a binder in the med room.
Nobody had an answer. There isn’t one.
Then the director of nursing, who has been there twelve years and who I have never once heard raise her voice, put a stack of papers on the table. She had been collecting them since the day it happened.
Forty-some notes from families. Some typed, most not.
She read one. It was from the son of a man named Halvor Bragg who died on our hall in 2019 with nobody left but a nephew in Alaska.
My father had no visitors for the last two years of his life except the woman who mopped his floor. She sat him up for his coffee. She told him it was Tuesday. When I could not be there, she was, and she never once made me feel judged for it. Whatever this is about, you have the wrong person and I would like this letter in her file.
I had to go stand in the hall a minute. Thirty-one years and I did not know he had written that.
The administrator apologized to me in that room and then, at the board’s instruction, on the intercom to the whole building at shift change, which I did not ask for and would not have.
She left in the spring. The board wrote a policy that nobody gets accused of anything in that building until the belongings log has been read out loud, and it has a number and everything.
Miss Ruth wears her ring on a chain now. I’m back on the floor at five in the morning, saying good morning to the ones who wait for it.