My father walked out the week my mother started chemo, and the last thing he said in our front hall was, “Call me when she’s normal again.” Thirteen years later his fiancée left him at a hospital entrance, and he got wheeled onto my floor with something locked in his fist.
Mom was on the couch under two comforters after her fourth round, shaking so hard the cushions squeaked.
I was thirteen and my brother was seven, and we sat on the landing, listening.
Clack. Clack. Clack.
His hard-shell suitcase, bumping down the stairs.
“I didn’t sign up for this,” he said, like he was ordering lunch. “I DON’T DO SICKROOMS.”
I grabbed the handle at the door.
“Dad, just stay till she falls asleep,” I said.
He looked at his phone and pulled the suitcase free.
By dinner he was at a rented lake house with the twenty-three-year-old who taught his spin class.
Two months later the house payments stopped.
The bank took it in March.
Mom fought and won. Nine years clear now.
I stocked pharmacy shelves overnight, did homework in oncology waiting rooms, and on her worst days I got her in and out of the tub.
Somebody was going to stay when it got dark, and it would be me.
Now I run nights on a stroke rehab unit in Toledo.
Last Tuesday we took a transfer from emergency, left side gone, speech thick and slow.
Bowers from social work handed me the packet with a pen behind each ear.
“His fiancée left him at the doors with the car running,” she said. “Called next morning. Says she’s thirty-six and didn’t sign up to be anybody’s nurse.”
I flipped the chart open.
RITTER, BRENT.
The birthday was the one I used to make cards for.
It was MY FATHER.
In 217 his eyes went to my badge, then my face, and stayed.
His right hand was clamped shut on the blanket, the way it had been since they brought him in.
“Don’t… go,” he said, every word dragging. “Please. You take it.”
He pushed SOMETHING into my palm, and when I saw WHAT it was, I had to sit down on his bed.
Room 217
It was a debit card.
Blue, from a credit union I’d never heard of, the plastic gone cloudy at the corners. BRENT RITTER stamped along the bottom. On the back there was a strip of masking tape over the signature panel, and on the tape four numbers in blue ballpoint, pressed so hard the tape had torn at the 4.
0614.
“Zero six one four,” he said. “You know it.”
I knew it. It was the garage keypad, the alarm, the combination on his tool chest. It was the birthday on the chart in my other hand, month and day.
The left side of his face hung. The right side was working at me. His good hand had opened and the fingers stayed curled where the card had been, like nobody had told them it was over.
“Eleven hundred,” he said. “Maybe. It’s what’s left. Take it.”
My knees had quit, so I sat on the edge of his mattress. I have written people up for that.
The call cord was looped around the bed rail. The monitor ran green numbers. Down the hall somebody’s bed alarm went off and stopped.
“Don’t go,” he said again, as if the first time hadn’t counted.
I looked at the tape. He had done this before they brought him up. Somebody in emergency had given a man with half his body gone a pen, and he had spent it on four digits.
He hadn’t said my name. He hadn’t said sorry, or Mom, or how are you.
What did he think four numbers on a strip of tape were going to buy?
The garage keypad
The March the bank took the house, a man in a windbreaker walked our lawn with a clipboard, and Mom sat in the Buick with both comforters in the back seat. They were the two things we owned that didn’t fit in a box. Her hair had come back as fuzz under a knit hat.
Jeremy had just turned eight. He walked up to the garage and punched 0614 into the keypad, and the door went up.
Empty. His side swept, the oil stain, a hook where the ladder had hung.
“Nobody changed it,” Jeremy said.
“Close it, Jer,” Mom said through the car window.
He closed it. He opened it again. He did it four times and Mom let him.
My father set the code on everything we had. Mom couldn’t have told you her own mother’s birthday, so six-fourteen ran the house. The Monday after the bank, she changed every code she could reach to zeros. She said she would rather forget a number than remember his.
He liked to say he was an honest man. When I was nine the dog went to a farm, and he sat me down on the porch steps and said, “I won’t lie to you, kiddo, Biscuit’s gone and he’s not coming back.” Mom had told me a farm. He thought that made him the better parent.
“I tell you what I am,” he said. “That’s more than most.”
So when he told us what he was in the front hall, with his suitcase on the stairs, I think he felt he’d done the decent thing.
I got my first phone at fifteen and I have had the same number since. His old cell went into it under Dad, because that’s what you do, and I never took it out. Delete is a button. Once a year the calendar app lights up on June fourteenth with his name on it, and I swipe it away.
Three years ago the Toledo paper ran a half page on our unit, and my badge picture was in it, squinting. Mom cut it out with the kitchen scissors and put it on her fridge under a lemon magnet. She circled the name of my floor in red pen so the neighbors wouldn’t miss it.
None of that was in my head in 217. What was in my head was the card, and my father’s good hand opening and closing on the blanket.
Bowers stood in the door, the pens still behind her ears.
“Inventory on his bag before day shift,” she said. “Two signatures. You and me. Policy.”
She looked at the card in my hand and then at me.
“And hon, you can’t be his nurse. You know that.”
I got up and went for the door.
Behind me, from the bed, he said my first name, the first time in thirteen years, and I kept walking.
The other end of the hall
Novak had the other end of the hall. Eleven years of nights, a thermos the size of a fire extinguisher. I gave him 217 at 12:15 with a report that left out everything but the numbers.
At 12:50 the call light over 217 started.
Novak went in and came out with a medicine cup and a face.
“He spit it.”
The cuff had him at 194 over 108. I phoned the on-call resident, who said that if he wouldn’t take it by mouth we’d push it in the IV and put a sitter on him. A sitter at one in the morning means pulling a body off somebody else’s floor.
“Try again,” I said.
Novak tried again. He came back with the same cup.
“He says he wants the one with the badge. I said I have a badge. He said the other one.”
So I did the thing I thought was smart. I traded my three patients for Novak’s three, so that 217 was just one more room on a hall and I was somebody else’s nurse. I took 211, a retired machinist who wanted to talk about gaskets.
At 1:40 the call light went again. Novak stood in the doorway of 211 with his hand over his mouth.
“He pulled his IV,” he said. “Right out. It’s on the blanket. He’s bleeding on the sheets a little.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Said that’s what happens when you send somebody else.”
I stood there in the doorway of a machinist’s room holding a gasket joke I hadn’t heard the end of.
Novak did not take my side. He was kind about it.
“Go in,” he said. “Do the pill. It’s a pill. You’ll have your hand out thirty seconds and he’s a guy with a pressure.”
“He’s not a guy.”
“Then it’s a Tuesday and he’s a guy,” Novak said. “Thirty seconds.”
I went in. The IV catheter was on the blanket in a smear of blood. I put a 2×2 on his forearm and taped it down, and I held out the cup.
He took the pill off my palm the way a kid does, lips only. He swallowed. He looked up at me with the whole working half of his face.
“Thank you, sweetheart.”
I took the cup and left. In the hall I ran the faucet in the clean utility room and held my wrists under it until my hands were cold.
The cuff read 168 over 96 twenty minutes later. At 2:40 Novak slid a sticky note across the desk, in his block capitals.
“He says the next one’s yours,” he said, “or he pulls the rest.”
Line two
At 3:10 line two lit on the desk phone.
“Is this the unit? I’m trying to find whoever has Brent Ritter.”
A woman’s voice, low and fast, a car running in the background or a fan.
“This is his daughter,” I said.
She didn’t say anything for the length of one breath.
“Okay. Oh. Okay.” Then, “I’m Foley. I’m not coming. I want to say that first. I’m sorry, but I’m not.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“No.” A pause. “I put his wallet and his phone in a bag with the paramedics. I closed our joint account at four yesterday afternoon. The card on him is the only account he’s got left in his own name. I’d say eleven hundred.”
“He gave it to me.”
“He would,” she said.
Over the phone I could hear her moving something heavy.
“I’m thirty-six,” she said, and stopped, and started again. “He had a stroke at the counter. In the kitchen, at the lake house. He was holding a coffee and then he wasn’t. And I got him in the car and I said Mercy’s four minutes away, and he said no. Toledo. He’d been saying Toledo since March. I found directions in the printer, folded up. I thought it was a job.”
“He doesn’t have a job.”
“No. He’s got a lot of things he says,” Foley said. “He made me drive past Mercy. His mouth was already going and he was pointing with his good hand. I did what he said. I dropped him at the doors because I was scared and I didn’t want to be the one who stayed.”
I had the pen in my hand and had written nothing.
“Tell him the ring’s on the dresser,” she said. “Not that he’ll care.”
She hung up before I could say anything.
I wrote it on a sticky note. Mercy, four minutes. He chose this one. Under it I wrote nothing, and I looked at the nothing.
At 4:05 the elevator opened and Jeremy came out in his warehouse vest with his keys still in his hand.
At one o’clock I had texted him: Dad’s here. 217. Don’t come. He had answered: not my problem. At 3:50: is he dying.
He was twenty now and taller than the man in the bed. He came up to the desk and put both hands flat on it.
“Where is he.”
“Two seventeen. Jer, you don’t have to.”
“I’m not going to talk to him.”
“Then why drive forty minutes?”
He looked down the hall at the door with the light on over it.
“I want to see him in a bed with the rail up,” he said.
The belongings bag
Bowers found us at 4:30 with the clear plastic bag marked PATIENT BELONGINGS and a clipboard.
“Before the day people,” she said. “Do it now and nobody asks me why I didn’t.”
We did it on the counter in the clean utility room, with Jeremy outside in the family lounge, sitting with his boots up on a chair he’d been told not to put them on.
You read each thing aloud and the other person writes it down. Bowers read, and I wrote.
One pair of gray sweatpants. One phone, dead. One ring of keys, five. One set of reading glasses, left lens cracked. Thirty-one dollars in a wallet. One driver’s license. One insurance card, lapsed in July.
“And a paper,” Bowers said.
It was folded in eighths and it had gone soft along the folds, the way a bill does that lives in a pocket. She handed it to me.
I opened it on the counter.
Half a page of the Toledo paper. The photo, my badge, me squinting. NIGHT NURSE OF THE QUARTER.
The name of my floor was circled in blue ballpoint. Then circled again. Then again, until the pen had worn the paper nearly through.
It was the same page that was on Mom’s fridge, under the lemon.
Bowers had her own paper in front of her, the face sheet from the emergency desk.
“Hon,” she said. “Read this line.”
She put her finger on it. Under REQUESTED UNIT, in some clerk’s handwriting: Pt refuses county bed. Refuses Perrysburg. Requests 4 West neuro rehab, states daughter runs nights.
“He couldn’t hardly talk,” Bowers said. “He said it in four tries until the clerk got it down. He wouldn’t be moved anywhere else. I saw it and I said nothing, because I didn’t know who you were to him. I didn’t know until you flipped the chart.”
I turned the clipping over.
On the back, in his square print, a phone number. It had been written, and crossed out, and written again beneath, seven times, down the page, the ink going pale then dark where he’d changed pens.
Ten digits. Mine.
The same number since I was fifteen.
He had it. He’d had it written down seven times, and he never pressed it once.
Five o’clock
I took the clipping with me. I didn’t decide to.
Jeremy got up when I came through the lounge, and I didn’t tell him not to. He came to the door of 217 and stopped on the sill, with his arms crossed over the vest.
My father was awake. The IV site was taped, the cuff cycled on his arm, the rail was up. His eyes went to the paper in my hand and he tried to sit.
“That’s mine,” he said. “Give me that.”
I put it flat on the blanket, face up, and I let him see the back.
“I had it all spring,” he said. “I was going to call. I was working up to it. You don’t know how many times I picked up the thing.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m not saying I was right. I’m saying I was honest. You know what your mother would’ve done? She’d have stayed and been miserable and lied about it for twenty years. I told you what I was. I told you in the hall, I stood there and told you. Not everybody has that.”
The monitor cycled. His good hand shook on the blanket.
“And I came here,” he said. “Foley won’t. My sister won’t pick up. I thought it through, I’m not stupid. You’re the one it’s, it’s what you do. You’ve got a floor. You know the people, you know how to get a man into a bed, you fill out the paper for the county thing. Eleven hundred. I looked it up, it’s about a month for a girl on days. You take the card, you start it, you don’t even have to be the one who.”
His mouth was working harder than the words.
“Your mother did that to you,” he said. “She made you hard. She always took the hard end of it and made you take it too. I’m not blaming you. You can’t help that. But you walk in here and sit on my bed like I’m the one who.”
“Dad,” I said.
“Don’t. Let me finish.”
“I gave him the number,” Jeremy said from the door.
My father’s head came around.
“Jer. Look at you.”
“I was sixteen. You were at the bus stop on Alder in a gray car. You asked me for her number and I gave it to you, and I said, call her. You said you would.”
“I was working up to it.”
“Four years,” Jeremy said.
He didn’t say anything else. He stayed in the door.
My father looked at him, and then at the ceiling, and then at me.
“You’ll do it,” he said. “You always did.”
I picked up the card from the table where I had left it and I turned it so the tape faced him.
“I’m off 217 at seven,” I said. “Novak has you. Bowers starts the county paperwork on Monday. I’m not signing as the responsible party.”
“Then I pull the IV again.”
“They’ll sedate you. They’ll be nice about it.”
His face went slack on the left and tight on the right, and I thought he would shout. He lay there.
“And I’ll write down that I was your daughter,” I said. “So nobody has to guess.”
“What are you going to do, then?” He tried to laugh. “Nothing? You’re going to do nothing, a nurse?”
“I’ll stay till you fall asleep.”
It took him a moment.
“Don’t be dramatic,” he said.
I pulled the chair to the rail, and sat, and Jeremy came in and took the other chair against the wall, and sat with his arms crossed.
He talked for another ten minutes, about the lake house, and the lease, and what Foley owed him. He stopped in the middle of a sentence. His breathing slowed down and his good hand opened on the blanket.
The tape on the card had curled at the corner, the way tape does. I smoothed it down with my thumb.
At 6:50 I put the card, the paper and his glasses back in the plastic bag. Bowers signed on the line under mine.
I told my manager at seven. Relatives don’t nurse relatives; they moved me to days for the month, and the night differential went with it, four hundred and twelve dollars that had been paying for Mom’s car insurance and her pills.
I paid Mom’s insurance out of savings that month. I wasn’t sorry. I didn’t tell her.
The lemon magnet
On Sunday I drove to Mom’s. She was on the couch with one comforter over her knees and the cat on her feet, and no shaking in her.
I told her at the kitchen table, in the order it happened, and she listened with her hands around the mug.
“What was on the card?” she said.
“Eleven hundred.”
“Did he give you the number?”
“He wrote it on tape. Zero six one four.”
Mom laughed, one hard bark, and put the heel of her hand against her mouth. She kept it there a while.
“I changed everything to zeros,” she said.
“I know, Mom.”
“It took me a month. I kept getting locked out of my own bank.”
She got up and went to the fridge. The page was there under the lemon, red circle and all. She looked at it, and then she turned and looked at me.
“Take it down?” I said.
“Leave it,” Mom said. “It’s a good picture of you.”
On Monday I drove my father to the county facility on the east side. It was the only bed that would take him on what he had. He didn’t talk in the car. Jeremy followed in his own truck and parked two spaces off, and stayed in it.
At the front desk a woman with a lanyard slid a form across the counter.
“Brent Ritter?” she said. “I need an emergency contact.”
I looked at the line. I had spent two days not looking at that line.
“Front desk,” I said.
“Ma’am?”
“Put the front desk.”
I handed her the plastic bag with the card in it, tape and all. I didn’t look at him in the chair. He had his good hand on the arm of it, fingers drumming.
In the parking lot I sat in the car with the engine off and opened my phone. The contact was where it had always been. Dad. The same ten digits, for a cell that now belonged to somebody in Florida, probably.
I typed the county desk’s number over his, and pressed save.
If this one hit close, pass it to somebody who once sat on a landing and listened.
For more complicated family histories, read about a father who skipped his own mother’s funeral, a fiancée whose adoption agency sparked an unexpected reaction, and the extra place card at a rehearsal dinner.
