He's the one who lifts her

The aide comes Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, seven thirty to ten thirty.

My mom has to be at the laundry in Santa Ana by six on those days, the one that does the hospital sheets. They run her on points. You call out, you get a point. Six points and you're done, and she's been sitting on four since my grandma got the pneumonia in February. So if the aide doesn't show up, my mom doesn't go in.

I do the pills, that part's mine. The blood pressure one is morning and it has to be with food, she has to get the cháo down first or it comes back up. The thyroid one you're supposed to do thirty minutes before anything, which I know nobody actually does. I do it. Then there's half of a small white one at night and you can't give it to her dry, she'll park it in her cheek and spit it in a tissue, and then you're going through the blanket at eleven at night looking for half a pill. Sorry. That's more than anyone needs.

Marco's the aide. Fourteen months on us, and the agency lady says that's long, they don't usually sit on one case that long. There was a woman named Rosalind before him, about three weeks. And a guy before her who wouldn't take his jacket off, in the middle of July. I don't know.

He gets her up out of bed by himself. It's been two years since the stroke and her left side doesn't do anything and she's heavier than she looks. He says bà ơi first, every time, before he touches her, he picked that up somewhere. Then he puts her knees between his knees and comes up with his legs and she's in the chair in about nine seconds.

I tried it in April when he was out for his brother's thing. I've watched him do it, I don't know, a few hundred times. She came up about four inches and then she was going sideways and I got her back down on the bed and she was fine, she was completely fine. The next week there was a purple mark on her arm where I grabbed her, and then it went yellow. My mom asked about it and I said she caught it on the rail.

I'm not a big guy. At the warehouse there's a step stool behind the door with KIET on it in Sharpie. Danny did that, my cousin, and now he's got a whole thing where he moves it. Not hides it. Just puts it somewhere else and stands there. His mom owns the place, so. Anyway, the acetone goes on the top shelf and I'm on that stool maybe thirty times a day.

The cup is the green plastic one with the flowers worn off it. She won't drink out of glass, she says it tastes like the glass, and if you hand her a mug she'll set it on the floor and look at you. Marco had that figured out right away. Nobody told him.

There's a paper sheet I sign. They've got the phone app for clocking in now but the agency still runs paper for the hours, and there's a line at the bottom for the household. I always signed it last. He'd hand me the clipboard at the door with his keys already out.

In June he started handing it to me around ten fifteen. And then he'd still be sitting there at eleven.

We'd be on the step by the dryer, mostly. She goes down hard after her bath and sleeps till noon, and the DVD's going in her room the whole time, Paris by Night, the one with the whole áo dài thing at the end. She's seen it four hundred times. He'd have his cards out on his knee, he's taking the LVN test in the spring, he's taken it twice already. Second time he missed it by four questions. Or six. One of those.

His handbook says no personal relationships with clients or members of the client household. He scrolled to it on his phone and showed me.

My uncle's in the garage. He did the insulation himself and there's a window unit in there and he puts more into the house than I do, which is nothing, I put in nothing. Twice now he's said something about that being a lot of room for a guy who's at Golden West two days a week. I'm signed up for two classes. I've been to one of them since about week three.

Last Saturday she was out by nine forty. My mom was on till two thirty, and my uncle does yards on Saturdays and he's never back before one. Marco handed me the sheet at ten past nine and neither of us said anything about it.

We went to my room. I don't know how long it was.

After, he rinsed the cup and put it upside down on the towel the way he does. He went in and checked on her. Then he had to go, Buena Park was at eleven, and I walked out to the car with him. It's a Civic with the sunshade in the windshield and he keeps his cards in the door pocket. He said see you Tuesday and I said yeah.

Then I went in to work at noon and Danny asked me what I was smiling at and I said nothing and he said okay, weirdo. A guy came in with a list off three salons and I was on the stool the rest of the day.

Sundays there's no shift. We text but it's all she didn't eat this morning, or running ten minutes behind. Sunday I typed something out and sat there with it and then deleted it and went and watched the Angels lose with my uncle with the garage door up.

Tuesday he got there at twenty past seven, which is early. He did the bath and had her in the chair by eight forty. She calls him Ma-cô, which isn't his name, and it gets her every time, she does the laugh where she smacks the arm of the chair.

He handed me the clipboard at ten fifteen.

Thursday the boiler went down at the laundry and they sent my mom home at eleven. His car was still out front. She came in and put her bag on the table and said hi to him and went and sat in with my grandma, and nobody said anything.

Friday morning in the kitchen she asked me, Marco stayed? And I told her about the sheet and about the hours, and how sometimes he has to wait around because the next house won't take him early. She said okay. Then she asked if it's still Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. I said yeah. She said okay and went to take her shower.

This morning I made the tea before he got her up so it'd be ready. I was standing out in the hall with it and he had her halfway and she was telling him something and I couldn't hear what from where I was. The tea was still too hot to hand her anyway, so I just stood there holding it.