Doug drew out the third page and read it in silence. He is a big, sleepy faced man of fifty four who manages a hardware warehouse, and he had never in his life seemed anything but contented. He read the heading, and then the number, and then he set the page down carefully on the binder and pressed his fingers to his eyes. “Ottilie Medical Apparel,” he said. “Sale to a national uniform company. Five million, six hundred thousand dollars.” He raised his head. “I have worn those scrubs. I have a pair of your clogs in the closet. My mother has a drawer full of your compression socks.” He turned and looked at his mother, who was staring at the white shoes on the table.
I waited for Linda to speak. She is fifty two, a trim, anxious woman with a nurse bag and rimless glasses, who has made a life of seeming to be tired on behalf of other people. She sat with her hands pressed together between her knees. “Mother,” she said at last, in a thin voice, “I can explain the county program.” “Please do,” I said. “Forty hours a week, Linda. Nineteen hundred dollars a month for twenty four months. Forty five thousand, six hundred dollars. And on the timesheets, there is your signature, week after week, saying you were here from eight to four.” I laid my hand on the clogs. “I wore these at the front desk of the shop, on my feet, in 1979. I was here. You were not.”
She began to weep, not loudly, but with a steady leaking of the eyes that she did not bother to wipe. “I did not think anyone would check,” she said. “I told myself I would do the hours. I told myself I was coming on Sundays, and I was doing grocery runs, and it was nearly forty hours if you counted the worry.” She laughed in despair. “I counted the worry. That is what I told myself.” Doug had gone gray around the mouth. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Linda, when I came home on Thursdays and you were at the clinic, was there ever a clinic?”
A pair of old white nursing clogs sat on a kitchen table beside a county letter and gave one uniform shop owner the Sunday evening to bring her daughter back to the fitting room.
She shook her head. “There was no part time job. There was no clinic. For two years I took the money and I put it in the account for the cabin, and I told you it was my salary.” The mother of Doug put down her coffee cup with a click. She is eighty, thin and straight backed, with the posture of a woman who taught Sunday school for fifty years. “Linda,” she said, “I defended you. I told this woman you were a saint.” Her voice was perfectly quiet. “I sat in her kitchen and said it to her face. You made a fool of me.” She turned to me, and the shame in her eyes was the shame of a proud woman. “Ottilie, I am so sorry.”
I reached across the table and took her hand. It was dry and cool, like paper. “Margaret, you have nothing to be sorry for.” “I do. I trusted the wrong person.” “You trusted your daughter in law,” I said. “That is what a mother in law is for.” She lowered her head and her whole thin body began to shake. I let her. I sat and held her hand, while Linda wept across from us and Doug stared at the wall, and I looked out the window at the lights of the big hospital coming on, floor by floor, in the November dusk. Nurses were arriving for the night shift. I could see them, small, crossing the street in their white shoes.
When the room had settled, I spoke. I am seventy eight years old, and I have never been a woman to raise her voice. “Linda, I will tell you what I know. You were not a thief by nature. You were a daughter with a husband who spends his weekends in a boat and a mother who does not need you. You felt unseen, and a check from the state was the one thing that told you your time was worth something.” She looked at me, stricken. “I understand it. I do not excuse it. But I understand it.” I pushed the binder away. “There is a better way to be seen. And I will show you.”
I told them the terms. The county would be told the truth on Monday, by me, with my lawyer, and the payments would stop. Linda would repay the forty five thousand, six hundred dollars over six years, by check, out of her wages. The guardianship petition would go in the shredder at the hardware warehouse, by the hands of Doug.
“And Linda, there is one more thing,” I said. “I would like you to work. For me. Not as a caregiver. As a fitter, in the shop. We need a woman who is good with nervous people, and you have a talent for sitting with them.” She stared at me. “I do?” “You sat with me on Sundays,” I said. “I never complained.”
She started in January. The new owners kept the shop on Broadway, and a manager named Pauline hired her on my say. For the first week she measured sock sizes and fumbled the register. By the third, she had learned to kneel on the carpet in front of a frightened student nurse in her first pair of scrubs, and say, in her warm, unhurried voice, “It will be all right. We will find the right fit.” I watched her through the glass, from the street, in my coat. I stood there for a quarter of an hour in the cold, with tears freezing on my cheeks, and did not go in.
In March, the girl from the nursing school came back, with a bouquet. She asked for Linda by name. She said that her mother had been very ill, and that the woman at the shop had talked to her for an hour. Linda took the flowers in two hands. I was behind the rack of white coats, unseen, and I heard her say, in a small, astonished voice, “Thank you. I do not think anyone has ever brought me flowers for doing my job.” She looked up and saw me. We stood looking at each other across the shop. Then she did something she had not done since she was ten years old. She ran across the floor, and put her arms around me, and I held on.