He brought back the chair

I work nights. Nineteen hundred to oh seven thirty, three on and four off, thirteen years at the same hospital. Med-surg is where I'm assigned but they float me wherever the hole is, which on nights is most of the building. I know which elevator is slow.

There's a bed alarm at the end of my hall I don't always catch, that's the left ear, I've had an aid in it since I was seven and I never put it on anything when they hired me. It comes up more on nights because there's fewer of us on the floor.

The family room on four sits between the elevators and the ice machine. Four chairs and a TV bolted up in the corner that only gets the one channel. Nobody's in there at oh four hundred unless something's happening upstairs.

He was in there the first night with a plastic bag on his lap, the kind we hand people for clothes. He wanted to know how the coffee worked. You have to hold the button down instead of pressing it, so I showed him, and then I sat down, because my lunch is thirty minutes and I'd already eaten in the car.

His wife was two floors up. I want to be clear that she was never mine. I wasn't on that unit and I never pulled her chart. Anybody can, that's the part people don't know, the whole building is one login away from everything, and it logs you.

He does refrigeration. Walk-ins, and the cases at the grocery up on Admiral Callaghan where the compressor kept short-cycling all last winter and nobody upstairs would sign off on replacing it. He talked about that a lot. He'd tell you about that compressor for twenty minutes if you let him.

We did eleven nights. Not in a row. My stretch is three and then I'm gone four, so it ran across most of a month. She was going slow, the way it goes when the kidneys are the last thing to quit, and he'd come down when they turned her because he didn't want to be in the room for that.

Sixth night, maybe seventh, he told me he had one of our chairs at his house. A lift recliner. The auxiliary loans them out and she couldn't lie flat at the end, with the fluid. I told him the equipment closet runs Monday to Friday, oh eight hundred to sixteen hundred, and that there's no hurry on a chair. People keep them a year. Nobody calls about it.

The eleventh night was the end of my stretch. I knew she'd go while I was off. He knew it too. He'd been counting the same days I had.

We are not allowed to give a patient or a family member personal contact information. That's not a gray area. It isn't a coaching conversation either. It sits in the same section as taking a gift worth more than twenty-five dollars and the word they use in there is termination. It doesn't touch your license. I looked that up after.

They give families a validation for the garage, a little stub with a barcode on the front of it. I wrote my cell on the back of his in blue pen and put it in his hand and went back up to finish my shift. I didn't say anything while I did it. He didn't either.

She died on my second day off, eleven thirty in the morning. I found that out in June, because he told me. He never called. I'm not going to sit here and say I wasn't looking at my phone all through March.

Then June. Report ran long so I came out at oh seven forty-five and there was a flatbed in the far row of the lot with a magnet sign on the door and the chair standing up in the bed under a moving blanket with a ratchet strap across it. He'd been sitting there since about oh six forty. I said the closet doesn't open until eight and he said he knew that.

We got it onto the dock and the tech signed for it a little after. Then he asked if I'd eaten and I said no. I don't eat before I sleep.

We went to the place on Tennessee that does the corned beef hash and he paid, and then I followed him out to the house in American Canyon, because he said the strap was still in the bed of the truck and he wanted to give it back to me. It wasn't my strap.

Where the chair had been there were four dents in the carpet. Deep ones. He'd vacuumed around them for four months.

I'd never been with a man. I'm thirty-nine. We went to bed in the middle of the morning with the blinds shut and that's the whole of what I'm going to say about the part in the room.

Afterwards he got up and made his side of the bed while I was still lying in it.

Then I drove back over the flats and slept four hours and went in at nineteen hundred. Worked a full twelve.

It's been like that since June. Ray calls in the morning on his way to the first job, and if it's one of my off days I'm asleep, so he calls the house, because the cell won't hold a signal in the front room and I told him that.

My mother is up at five thirty no matter what anybody does. She did thirty-one years at Kaiser, so her clock is worse than mine. She came here after my father and the front room is hers now and neither of us has ever said out loud how long that arrangement runs for.

She leaves me a plate on the stove with a saucer over it and the rice cooker on warm. Sunday she said, who calls here at seven. I said it's work. She said, work called Thursday too.

She had the water going the whole time. I ate standing up.