I want to tell you about the morning two men in gray polo shirts carried my chair, my reading lamp, and forty years of Walter’s love letters down a hallway that smelled like bleach and boiled peas, and set them down in a room with no window.
I did not ask for the move. Nobody asked me anything. I found out the way you find out most things at seventy eight, which is that other people decide, and then somebody tells you afterward, gently, like they’re breaking news about the weather.
“We just think you’ll be more comfortable back here, Mrs. Merrick,” the aide said, not meeting my eyes. “Closer to the nurses’ station.”
Room 114 was not closer to anything except the laundry chute and the ice machine, which clunked every forty minutes like a fist on a door. There was no garden view. There was a strip of frosted glass block where a window should have been, the kind you find in a basement, and it let in a gray smear of daylight that was not quite light and not quite dark. I had lived in Room 212 of the Sunroom Wing at Maple Ridge Manor for two years and eight months. I had a window that looked out over the little courtyard with the bird feeders and the crabapple tree that turned the color of a sunset every October. I had watched two Christmases and three Aprils out that window. I had watched my great grandson learn to walk on that lawn, wobbling between two nurses’ aides who cheered him on like he’d crossed a finish line.
I did not choose to leave that room. My son did.
His name is Nash. He is fifty one years old, a loan officer at the credit union in town, and for three years, ever since his father died, he has been the trustee of the money that was supposed to keep me safe for whatever time I have left. I did not learn what he had done to that money, and to me, until a new nurse named Twyla Whitfield looked twice at a billing sheet and said, quietly, “Something here isn’t right.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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