Monday morning my phone rang, and it was Miss Earlene’s son, and I will tell you right now that he is not a lawyer, which is what everybody in this town assumed and which is what I assumed too.
Dwight Pilcher is the chaplain at the hospice house out on Quaker.
He did not call about Tyler. He never mentioned Tyler and when I brought it up he changed the subject, twice, on purpose.
He called to offer me a job.
Front desk at that hospice house. Days, Monday through Thursday, and what the job is, mostly, is being the first person somebody sees when they come through that door on the worst afternoon of their life.
You sign them in. You tell them where the bathroom is. You say their name.
It pays four dollars and change more an hour than the store did, with better insurance, and I asked him twice if he was making it up for me and he got a little short with me the second time.
Then he read me the position description, because I did not believe him.
That house opened in 1994 and the woman who founded it wrote the front desk job herself, and they have not changed a word of it in thirty-one years.
The person at this desk is the most important employee in this building. Every family that walks through that door has been in a hospital where nobody looked up. Greet them. Learn their names by the second visit. Nothing that happens down the hall will matter to them as much as the first thirty seconds of the first day, and that is your thirty seconds.
Twenty-six years a man on a clipboard called that a charity position.
I started on the ninth. I have been there fourteen months.
I keep peppermints in a bowl on that desk. That was not permitted at first and it is now, and there is a line in the supply order for them.
Miss Earlene comes Tuesdays. She is eighty-eight and she takes a taxi and she sits in that lobby for two hours and she talks to families in a way I could not teach anybody, and Dwight has stopped pretending she is visiting him.
I know four hundred names in that building. I knew forty thousand in the other one.
The store called me in March. A district person, very nice, said things about a mistake having been made. I told her I was suited where I was and I thanked her and I meant it.
Tyler is still at that store as far as I know. I have not gone in and that is not a boycott, it is a thirty-minute drive, and I am not going to pretend it is a principle.
He told me nobody needs a fat old woman in a vest saying hi to them.
There is a building on Quaker Avenue where a woman wrote down in 1994 that saying hi to somebody is the most important thing that happens in the whole place, and they have kept it in writing for thirty-one years, and now it is my desk.