28
The next morning, my first Wordle guess is brAVE. As in, I’ve decided I’m going to be brave today.
Before work, I head to the local hospital to visit Mrs. Finnamore. She was transferred back from Charlottetown to the local
hospital to do a little more rehab prior to going home, and I’ve been too afraid to visit her until now. But like I say, today
I’ve decided to be brave.
I buy a card and a vase of flowers from the hospital gift shop and ride up to the second floor with my heart in my throat,
visions of Mrs. Finnamore groaning on the ambulance stretcher flashing before my eyes.
To my relief, when I walk into her room, I find her sitting up in a chair by the window, bossily lecturing the poor woman
in the bed opposite hers.
“If you keep spoiling your grandson like that, he’s going to grow up into an awful little— Emily!” Mrs. Finnamore interrupts
herself, spotting me in the doorway.
“Hi, Mrs. Finnamore. Is it okay if I come in?”
“Of course, dear. Come in, have a seat.” She gestures for me to sit on the end of her hospital bed. “This is my home care
girl,” she tells the other woman loudly. “You need to think about getting one of them yourself, Bertha. You’re not getting
any younger.”
The woman, Bertha, waves Mrs. Finnamore away. “You worry about your own problems, let me worry about mine.”
I stifle a smile at Mrs. Finnamore’s affronted expression.
“How are you doing?” I ask, to distract her.
“Oh, I’m fine,” she says dismissively. And actually, she does look pretty good. She’s maybe a touch paler than before, but
she’s dressed in her own clothes rather than a hospital gown, and she has a crossword book on the little table in front of
her.
“Does your hip hurt a lot?”
“Not at all,” she says. “The nurses ask me a hundred times a day, and every time I tell them no. Even when it twinges a bit,
I just take a bit of Tylenol. I’m not interested in messing around with street drugs.”
“I don’t think they use street drugs in hospitals.”
She shakes her head. “Barberie told me—you know Barberie, from my old bridge club?—she told me her nephew stole all her pain
pills after her knee surgery and sold them on the streets in Charlottetown. I’m not letting the doctors send me home with
any of those, thank you very much. I’m on enough medicine as it is.”
“Speaking of medicine,” says a bright voice at the door. I turn and see a middle-aged nurse in scrubs bearing a cup of pills.
“Time for your morning pills.”
“Oh, lord,” Mrs. Finnamore says. “Look at all these.” She shows me the pills. “They’ve doubled my pills since I’ve been in
here.”
“I think that’s about the same as before,” I say doubtfully.
“Are you a family member?” her nurse asks me.
“This is the home care girl I told you about,” Mrs. Finnamore says. “Emily.”
The nurse looks at me with interest. “You work for VON?”
I recognize the name—those are the real home care nurses, the ones who can give needles and take blood and stuff. “Oh no,” I say quickly. “I’m not a nurse. I just help out a few folks with laundry and groceries and things.”
“Well, we certainly need more of that,” the nurse says. “The wait lists for home care right now are appalling.”
My heart flutters nervously in my chest. I swallow hard and say, “I actually do have time for a few more clients. You know,
if there’s ever a patient who needs a little help...”
“You should give your number to Jane, she’s our care coordinator. I think she keeps a list of private places.”
My heart thumps harder in triumph. “That would be great,” I say, trying not to sound overly pleased. “Thanks!”
She smiles and leaves us to our visit. I sit with Mrs. Finnamore for another quarter hour before I tell her I have to head
to work.
“Don’t be taking on too many new folks while I’m in here,” she says. “I’m going to need your help when I get home.”
I hesitate. “Do you think Debra will still want me to? I mean, you might need professional nursing care while you’re recovering.”
“Oh, nonsense,” she says. “The physiotherapist already said he’s going to come to my house after I go home, and that’s all
I’ll need for my hip. I don’t want strangers traipsing in and out of my house.”
“I think Debra was pretty upset about your fall,” I say carefully.
“Debra’s always upset about something,” Mrs. Finnamore says. “That’s my daughter,” she explains to her roommate. “She lives
out west. She used to be such a clever girl, but her father spoiled her rotten.” She turns back to me. “You’ll come visit
me again tomorrow, then.”
I smile. “Of course. And we can talk more about you getting proper home care.”
Mrs. Finnamore pretends not to hear this. “Bye, now.”
Chuckling, I head back to the nurse’s station. The clerk tells me Jane is busy with a family meeting, but she takes my cell
phone number and information and promises to pass them along. I feel a bit nervous thinking about my name going on some official
hospital list of private caregivers, but then I remember Jim calling me his guardian angel, and I lift my chin up stubbornly.
I spend the rest of the day working at the shop, using my downtime to Google things like “how to start your own business”
and “how much can you charge for caregiving services without being a greedy dick.” At the end of my shift, I kiss John goodbye
and head back to my house. After dinner, I put my cell phone on the kitchen table and stare at it for a few minutes. John
offered to be here with me for this, but it feels like something I have to tackle alone.
I take a breath and dial Debra’s number.
It rings five times, just enough that I start to secretly hope she won’t pick up. Then—
“Hello?”
Oh, god, I forgot how mean her voice is.
“Hi.” My voice squeaks. I clear my throat and try again. “I mean, hi, Debra. This is Emily.”
“Emily. Hello.” Her tone is forbidding.
“Hi,” I say again. I steel myself and launch into the speech I’ve prepared. “I’m calling because Mrs. Finnamore told me she’s
being released from the hospital sometime in the next few weeks. She’d like me to come back to work for her.”
Debra lets out a cold breath. “Oh, she would, would she?”
I grit my teeth. “Yes. She’s nervous about getting around once she’s home.” This is a teensy lie—what she actually said was that if the doctors didn’t let her go home soon, she was going to call the police on them—but I think she’d be fine with me saying it.
“And you’re going to help with that, are you?” Debra says caustically.
I almost falter at her tone, but instead I lick my lips and say, “Yes.”
“She shouldn’t be going home at all. It’s ridiculous the doctors are allowing it.”
“She said they’re really pleased with how she’s done since her surgery.”
“Oh, I’m sure she said that,” Debra says.
I press two fingers to my temple and bite my tongue to stop from answering. I don’t want to get drawn into a fight with her.
“She’d like me to come back and do the same things I was doing for her before,” I say instead, “but I’d also like to add a
half-hour every other day, to be there in the house when she’s showering. Not, like, be in the bathroom with her, I mean,
but just to be nearby to make sure she doesn’t slip, and to help her if she needs it.”
“She needs a lot more than just that if she thinks she’s going to stay at home much longer,” Debra says. “She needs to get
rid of that disgusting old tub, the rail is three feet high. No doubt that’s what she fell over—”
She keeps ranting a little longer. I wait for her to run out of steam.
“I suppose you’ll want more money now, will you?” she finishes nastily.
I almost say no, just to avoid a fight. Then I grit my teeth. “Mm. A half-hour every other day.”
I can’t see her face, but I imagine her pursing her lips unpleasantly. There’s a long, cold silence, then she says, “I’ll have to discuss it with my husband.”
I let out a little breath of relief. I’ve won. I know I have.
“Of course,” I say politely. “I can give you another call a bit closer to her discharge date.”
“They’d better not discharge her next week,” Debra says. “I’ve never heard of a woman her age going home after such a big
surgery. I’ve told them they have to put her in a home, but she’s got them all wrapped around her finger—”
She goes on in that vein for another minute or two, then huffs loudly and says, “I’ve got to go,” like I’m the one holding
her up. She hangs up, and I drop my forehead onto the kitchen table.
That woman is exhausting .
Still, I can tell that she’s going to give in. Mrs. Finnamore told me that while Debra was here, one of the doctors asked
Mrs. Finnamore if she’d ever thought about moving out west to live with her daughter.
“You should have seen the look on her face!” Mrs. Finnamore said, laughing. “Debra would rather eat chalk than let me move
in with her. Not that I’d want to, mind you. She’s got three of those terrible yappy dogs, always biting your ankles and getting
fur all over the couch cushions.” She shuddered. “I’d rather go to a home.”
Anyway, if the wait lists for publicly funded home care are as long as that nurse said, Debra doesn’t have a lot of other
options besides me. Plus, Mrs. Finnamore would throw a fit if Debra tried to send a stranger into her house.
I sit back in my chair with a grin. I’m pretty proud of myself for how I handled that. It was a bit nerve-wracking, but I got through it.
I take a celebratory sip of my soda, grab my phone again, and call John to tell him how it went.