The next day, before I’d even finished my coffee, the phone rang, and it was Marlene Roddy, night charge on Three West, talking so fast I had to ask her twice to slow down.
Mr. Ordiway was awake. Eighty-eight years old, in for a hip, sharp as a tack in the daytime and foggy after dark, and that morning he had told his daughter exactly what happened to his fifty dollars. He gave it to a young man in a gray polo shirt who came in around ten-thirty and offered to run down and get him a ginger ale and some peanut butter crackers. He never came back. Mr. Ordiway had been too embarrassed to say so.
Gray polo. Housekeeping at that hospital wears burgundy. Has since 1998. I have burgundy scrubs in my closet with my name stitched on the pocket in white thread.
The gray polos were the trial crew from the outside service the supervisor had brought in for a two-week pilot, working the first half of the night before my shift ever started.
That was the thing I carried out of the building with me and chose not to hand her. My assignment sheet. The one Marlene initials at the top of every shift, the one that shows I clocked into 314 at 12:04 and worked the wing room by room in order, and did not touch 340 until ten minutes after four. The theft got called in at one-fifteen. She never asked me one question. She had a resignation form already printed and sitting on the counter, and she said it loud so the whole shift could hear, and I decided she could go find her own answers.
By morning it wasn’t mine to keep to myself anymore, because it wasn’t about me. That young man was still working nights around sick old people who could not remember what they’d handed him.
I put on a clean shirt and I drove down there and I asked for the nursing director, and I laid that sheet on her desk and told her to pull the badge log at the vending alcove on One between ten-twenty and eleven.
They pulled it. It took them forty minutes.
They held an open meeting on Three West that Friday at shift change, both shifts, standing room. The director said the outside contract had been ended that morning and that the young man had been reported. Then she said my name and the number nine thousand, which somebody in payroll had gone and worked out, and she read something Mr. Ordiway had dictated to his daughter and signed with an X and a shaky O.
She is the one who fixed my blanket every night when she thought I was asleep, and she never once let me feel like a bother. Whoever said she stole from me does not know her, and I would like them to hear this out loud.
They gave me my keys back and eleven days of back pay. The supervisor apologized in that room in front of everybody, and I believe she meant it, and I told her so.
I went back on nights. I still fix the blankets. And I have learned to say the true thing out loud the first time, instead of carrying it out to the parking lot with me.