I asked to be taken off his case

Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. I'm parked on the street outside the house by seven ten and I don't go up the walk until fifteen, because fifteen is what's on the sheet and there's a clock in the kitchen he can see from his chair.

Blood pressure sitting, then standing. He's on warfarin and one for the pressure, so the standing number is the one that matters, and both of them go on the sheet. Pulse. Then the bathroom, then the chair in the shower, then the shave, then the pills at eight with a half glass of water. Not a full glass. He doesn't like a full glass.

The house is up above the highway in Pacifica where the fog sits until eleven. The son-in-law built the ramp on the side and built it too steep. The heat's on seventy-four and I don't touch the heat.

Agency rules. Nothing given either direction. No keys. You don't hand out your own phone number and you don't eat anything out of their kitchen. You don't stay past the hour that's written down, because the hour is what's covered. Twenty-eight years I've been with the same agency and there's nothing in my file.

I'm five foot four and a hundred and forty, and when somebody goes down in a bathroom and the family can't get them up, the office calls me. You get on the floor behind them and put your forearms up under the armpits with their arms crossed over the chest. Then it's your legs. People stand out in front and pull with their arms and that's how you end up on the tile with them.

Some clients you're a piece of equipment to them. That's still the job. I had a man in Colma who said maybe four words to me in a year and two of them were the dog's name.

Mr. Lindgren talks from the second the water goes on. Thirty-four years at PG&E on the gas side. His wife Dorrie died in 2019, pancreas, nine weeks from the scan to the funeral. He tells me about the Giants and he tells me the same story about a trench on Skyline in 1981 about every third week, and I let him.

The shave is where the rule is. He's on the warfarin, so the care plan says electric, and the electric takes nothing off his jaw and leaves his neck broken out. He has a safety razor he's had since he was twenty-something and the first month he asked me to use it. I use it. I go slow and with the grain, and twice in two years I've cut him under the jaw, and it closed under my thumb inside a minute. That's my registration number on the state website.

The brush is mine. Twenty-two dollars at the place in Serramonte, and I left it on his shelf. That's a gift. I said nothing given either direction. I know what I said.

Walt gets cold in the chair even at seventy-four, so the towel goes over his shoulders before anything else. I hold his jaw with two fingers and turn his head where I need it.

I do the six o'clock at St. Andrew, second row, and I've been in that row since the kids were in grade school. Saturdays I'm out of Pacifica by nine and up in Vallejo by ten thirty, my daughter's place. The baby's eleven months and he's got my father's ears.

February was the storm that shut the highway at the slide. Power out from Thursday night. I came around through San Bruno and it took me an hour and ten instead of twenty minutes, and the house was fifty-one degrees inside when I got there. I'm not putting a seventy-year-old man in a shower at fifty-one degrees, and the water heater's electric anyway, so I boiled water in a stockpot on the gas range and washed him at the sink, one section at a time, towel over whatever part I wasn't working on.

The roads were still shut and I had nothing until two, so I stayed. He had a radio that runs on batteries. Around ten he went to sleep in the chair with his hand on the arm of it. I sat on the ottoman across from him and I didn't get up. Forty minutes, maybe. Nothing happened. Nothing happened.

I was in that house three hours and forty minutes. On the sheet I put one hour. You put down the hour that's authorized, that's how it works, and if I'd written three-forty the office would have called about it and the insurance would have kicked the visit back.

The sheet is a half page. Arrival and departure, the vitals, what was performed, and down at the bottom my registration number printed under the line I sign. Charmaine countersigns them at the office and they go in to the state. So it's a false record with my number on it.

There's eleven years left on the house on Hillside. I called Charmaine on a Monday in March and told her to give Pacifica to somebody else. I said the transfers were coming up hard on my back and I'd rather have something closer to Daly City. The MRI was in January, L4 and L5, and the doctor at Kaiser on Geary told me what I've got left in it working the way I work, which is about two years.

She put me on a woman in Westlake. Hoyer lift, two hundred and change, daughter in the kitchen on the phone the entire hour with the TV going in the other room. Nice lady. The daughter called me the guy. As in, the guy's here.

Two weeks of that and my back was worse, not better, which anybody could have told you. A lift takes it out of your low back every single time. A walk-in with a seat and a bar on the wall is four feet of assisted transfer and then you're standing there with your hands free.

Marilou works swing at Seton so we get about an hour together in the kitchen most days. Second week she's at the sink and she says, hindi ka na kumakanta. You don't sing anymore. I told her my throat was dry. She didn't ask again. She made sinigang that night.

I called Charmaine the following Monday and told her the Pacifica house was actually the easier one on my back, because of the seat and the short transfer. She said fine, there's no shortage of work. It took ninety seconds and she was already talking to somebody else in the office by the time she said okay.

Two weeks and a day I was gone. He'd had two different aides in that time and they used the electric, which is what the care plan says, and his neck under the jaw was broken out the way it gets. He said, you were out. I said, my back. He said, huh. Then he started in on the bullpen like I'd been there Saturday.

The brush was on the shelf where I keep it, standing up in the cup, with the soap dried into it in a ring. I ran the hot tap over it and worked the old soap out with my thumb and laid it on its side on the folded towel.

He asked if I wanted coffee. I can't take anything out of a client's kitchen. He's known that for two years and he asks anyway. I said no thank you and put the towels in the machine and set it on the long cycle.