Part 3 — The Billing Binder
Ms. Lindgren read the total at the bottom of the page in a voice that hardly carried across the boardroom table.
“Four hundred eighty-seven thousand, six hundred dollars. Billed for therapy and bathing assistance on the Maple Hall unit in one year.”
The box of doughnuts sat untouched. Six men in suits looked down at their hands.
“Wade,” she said, “how many therapy staff do we employ?”
“Two,” he whispered. “Part time.”
“And how many hours of therapy do these invoices claim?”
He did not answer. His boots had come off the desk, and his greasy hand was gripping the edge of the table.
I had taken a Polaroid every Friday for twenty-two months so my mother could see her curls on Monday, and those little squares of film had counted more honestly than the whole billing department.
Ms. Lindgren called the corporate counsel that same hour. She told the board that Tennessee has a Medicaid Fraud Control Unit and that the facility was required to report any billing for care that was not given. She stood up and said she would be the one to make the call.
Wade was placed on leave by the end of the meeting, and by Friday he no longer had a badge.
The bill for eleven thousand, two hundred dollars was voided that afternoon, with an apology in writing. Briarwood refunded my mothers twenty-four hundred dollar deposit by check. Her hearing aids turned up in a drawer in the business office, wrapped in a tissue. Her rocking chair came out to my car on a cart, pushed by a young aide who cried when she handed it over.
The state investigators took the shoebox of Polaroids. They sent it back in January with a note that said, “Your photographs were Exhibits 14 through 35.”
The facility was fined and placed under monitoring. The families on Mamas hall were notified and refunded, one by one. A woman I had never met sent me a card with a pressed flower and the words, “You spoke for all of us.”
I do not say it made me happy. But in the quiet of my own kitchen, with the rocking chair by the window, I felt something shift.
On a Friday in May I went out to the cemetery with my train case of rollers. I knelt by the grave, and I set one roller on the grass.
I held up a little mirror to the headstone.
“Well,” I said, in Eunice Fishers voice. “That will do.”