Miss Abernathy took off her gloves one finger at a time, lavender cotton, and laid them beside her plate of ham as if she were about to say grace. Then she drew a church fan from her purse, the cardboard kind on a wooden stick, with a praying Jesus on the front, and turned it over. The back was covered in blue ballpoint, shaky and slanted. “Mr. Lamar,” she said, “I am ninety one years old, and I have kept this fan since October of 2020. I would like to read you what it says.”
Lamar had a forkful of peas halfway to his mouth. He is fifty five, broad and tanned, a man whose face smiles down from a billboard on Highway 49 over the words Hurt? Call Lamar. He lowered the fork. “Miss Abernathy, with respect, I do not see what this has to do with Terrence.” “Then you have not been listening,” said the old woman, gently. At the end of the table my son sat very still in his Sunday shirt with the sleeves a little short, and his ears were red. Terrence is thirty. He is quiet at most things.
“The hurricane took the power at Magnolia Court at two in the afternoon,” said Miss Abernathy. “Ninety degrees inside. Forty one of us, most in bed, most unable to rise. The generator failed by dark, and the night staff could not get through the fallen trees. One boy stayed.” She looked down the table. “He went room to room with a paper fan and a bucket of water. He fanned me for nine hours. When his arm gave out, he changed hands. When both gave out, he put the fan in my hand and moved my wrist for me.”
A church fan lay face up on an Easter tablecloth and gave one mother the length of a prayer to bring her brother in law back to her son.
She held the fan up and read it slowly, in the voice of a woman who has read scripture at bedsides. Thirty four names, in thirty four different hands, some barely letters. Under them, one line. “In case we do not live to say it: this boy is the reason.” “We signed by lantern,” she said. “Twenty one of us have since gone home to the Lord. I am one of the last who can still hold a pen.” She laid the fan on the tablecloth, face up, beside the deviled eggs. “I wanted him to hear it at a table, Mr. Lamar. Not in a hallway.”
I looked at my son. “Terrence, you never told me,” I said. He lifted one shoulder. “Mama, it was a job.” “It was thirteen dollars and seventy five cents an hour,” said Miss Abernathy, “and you stayed through a hurricane for people who could never pay you back.” She turned to Lamar. “My son Winston is your partner at the firm. He told me last week that you say the boy wipes people for a living. I said, I will go and see this boy for myself. I have seen him. I have the fan.”
Lamar stood up. I will give him this: he made no excuse. He is a loud man, but there is a conscience under it, like a stone under a quilt. “Terrence,” he said, “I have told that joke for ten years. I told it in front of your mother. I never once asked what the work was.” “It is mostly lifting,” said Terrence, mildly. “And listening. People tell you things at three in the morning that they never told their children.” Lamar looked at the fan on the tablecloth. “I would like to be told something,” he said. Nobody laughed. Nobody moved.
I stood then, because I am his mother, and I told Lamar what I thought was fair. Three nights on the overnight shift at Magnolia Court, in scrubs, doing whatever Terrence told him to do. No lawyering. No business cards. And the billboard on Highway 49, the one with his teeth on it, would come down for a month and say something else, at his expense. Lamar nodded before I finished. “Name the words,” he said. I looked at Terrence, and Terrence, for the first time all day, almost smiled. “Thank a nursing assistant,” he said.
Lamar worked his three nights in August, in the heat, in green scrubs a size too tight. Terrence taught him to turn a resident without hurting the shoulders, to wash a face with a warm cloth, to sit and say nothing. On the second night a woman of ninety called him by the name of her husband and held his hand until dawn, and he let her. He came out into the parking lot gray and wet eyed. “I could not do this for a week,” he told my son. “Most people cannot,” said Terrence, and handed him a coffee.
The billboard went up on the first of September. THANK A NURSING ASSISTANT, in tall white letters, over a plain hand holding a plain fan. Cars honked at it all month on Highway 49. Miss Abernathy sent her own news by mail, on cream paper: the Abernathy family foundation would pay the full cost of nursing school for Terrence, tuition and books, with a stipend so he could go part time at work. He read it standing in my kitchen, in his socks, and then he sat down on the floor, a grown man, and put his face in his hands.
He starts classes in the spring, and he will be a registered nurse in two years. At Easter this year he sat at the head of the table for the first time, because the rest of us insisted, and carved the ham with a hand that did not shake. Lamar stood with his glass. My heart went tight, as it always does. “To the one who stays,” he said. The church fan hangs above our mantel now, in a frame, with thirty four names around it, and a thirty fifth in new blue ink: Lamar.