He comes in every night at seven

Seven o'clock is when Wheel of Fortune comes on in the dayroom, so that's how I know where I'm supposed to be. Pulling trays. That's the job. People hear care home and they picture something sad, and mostly it's trays, and a lady in 211 who calls me Sonny and asks me every single night if I've eaten yet. Yes ma'am. I've eaten. I've been eating since about 1994.

I did twenty in the Navy. Boxed at a hundred and thirty-two pounds, which I only bring up because you can't tell by looking. Then twelve years across the water at the refinery. Now I'm over in Benicia four nights a week and a double on Sunday, because the pension covers the house and it does not cover my daughter's situation. She's got the back bedroom and her two boys have what used to be the office. Three mornings a week she's on the machine over on Tuolumne, and somebody's got to have the copay ready, so here I am at two in the morning wiping down a bed rail and looking fantastic doing it.

Anyway. 214 is Gene Braddock. Surveyed for the county thirty-four years. Every road that goes up through Green Valley he had his hands on, and he'll tell you about it, except he won't now. He's sixty. The stroke took his right side. He's on the thickened juice and somebody's got to sit with him a good forty minutes.

That's his son. Wade. I didn't even know his name for about a year. Tree work, out of Cordelia. Comes in with sawdust in his cuffs and walks it down my hallway, and I've never once said anything about it, which I consider generous.

Tray goes in at ten of and he gets there on the hour. He hasn't been late once in two years. Tray sits in there getting cold on the overbed table. Him and me are out by the linen cart.

That hallway's got a laminated evacuation map in it and a hand sanitizer thing that's been empty so long I stopped checking. We talk about nothing. The Giants bullpen. His mother, who passed in 2017, who he says would have hated the wallpaper in this place more than anything else about it.

I tell him about my grandsons. I tell him the same stories about my grandsons. He lets me. I don't ask him about it.

Roselle asked me one time how come I run 214's tray myself when I've got the whole B hall. I told her the new girl sets the cup down on his left and he's got no left.

There's a line in the handbook about staff and residents' families. I signed it when I started and then they redid the whole book last spring and I signed it again. My wife Lita calls me a very agreeable man and she is not saying it nice.

Okay so February. No, hold on. First this. Lita's got a Magic Sing out in the garage that has not been put away since her cousin's sixtieth. It's sitting on the chest freezer with the cord running across the floor where somebody's going to break a hip, and every time I say I'll deal with it she says put it away when you stop using it. Thirty-one years. She's got me pretty well figured.

February. Gene aspirated twice in five weeks and the second one put him in Kaiser, and they had the meeting about whether to put a tube in him. Wade came out of that meeting and went down past the linen cart and sat on the floor with his back against the wall, work boots and all.

I got down there with him. Took me a while. I can't get up off the floor no more without grabbing hold of something, and my grandsons think that's the funniest thing that ever happened to anybody.

He didn't say anything for a long time. Then he said his dad used to stand up on the tailgate to see over the brush, and that the county told him twice to quit doing it. Then he put his hands over his face.

I put my hand on the back of his neck and left it there.

Then I told him that tray was stone cold and I'd go get him a hot one, and he laughed with his face still wet, and I went and got a hot one. That was February.

They didn't do the tube. He came back and he did all right for a while, actually. Gave Roselle a hard time. Spring came around and Wade started showing up in a clean shirt. I started shaving before the four-to-twelve. Lita said I smell good for a man going to work in a building full of old people. I told her it's out of respect. She got me with the dish towel.

One night out there he stood in close enough that his arm was up against mine and it stayed there. We were talking about what a load of gravel costs now. Roselle came down the hall and we both stepped back.

Anyway. I came in Thursday the ninth and there was a new card in the slot by the door of 214. Alcala, respite. They'd already turned the room.

I was off Tuesday and Wednesday. That's how I found out.

I stood there long enough that Roselle asked was I all right and I told her I was just hungry, and she gave me half a pandesal out of her bag, and I ate it standing up in the hall.

He came back the week after for the belongings. I'd picked up the shift, because of course I did. He had a banker's box up on his hip with the framed picture on top, Gene out at the transit with his hat on backwards.

We stood out by his truck under the light a while. He said thanks for everything. Then he didn't go anywhere.

He asked did I ever get over to the Sonoma side. I said not much. He said if I ever wanted to get a beer sometime. Then he got a receipt out of his back pocket and wrote his number down on the tailgate in the dark and had to ask me twice whether the nine looked like a nine.

I said something. I don't know what I said. Something about how I'm asleep when normal people are out doing things. He got in and pulled out onto Southampton, and I still had four hours left on my shift.

I kept it in my shirt pocket two days. Lita goes through my pockets before she washes anything, on account of one phone I put through the machine in 2019 which she will be bringing up at my funeral. So Friday I took it out and put it in the coffee can in the garage where I keep the drill bits.