SOMEONE TO SIT WITH MY MOTHER ON THURSDAYS
She likes the radio. She needs turning once. Nine years. I will pay what I can, which is not the rate. I know this is not the place.
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On Thursday a woman came. She did not explain how she had found the address. She took off her rings, warmed her hands and asked the mother which side hurt. The daughter had stopped asking. There had been nine years of the same answer.
The woman turned her without pulling the sheet cold beneath her. Then she sent the daughter out for an hour.
There was nothing the daughter knew how to do in an hour. She walked as far as the café and came back with a cake her mother could not eat. They ate it in the kitchen while the radio played.
The woman left a companion booklet by the radio. Two rows of holes beside the staples. Inside the back cover someone had written:
When is the room empty?
“Never,” the daughter said when she came again.
“Then we'll use it as it is.”
The woman asked for a key. The daughter took the spare off its nail. It made a pale scratch on the paint where it had hung.
Next Thursday the woman brought applications. The first was for the collections counter. Then supervisor, appointments. Then head of the office. The daughter knew the names of the people doing those jobs. She had stood under them on the directory for years.
“None of these is vacant.”
“We are filling them before they are empty.”
She put a pen beside the cake plate. On each application were two boxes: RETAIN. DISMISS.
“You mean hiring.”
“The ones who want to stay have to apply too.”
“And the others?”
The woman took the plate to the sink. She washed the dried sugar from it with her thumb. From the bedroom the mother asked to be turned.
“One minute,” the woman said.
The first applicant was the clerk who had removed the daughter's notice. At the window he had told her that personal circumstances were not vacancies. Now he stood beside the kitchen chair. He had brought his own pen.
“Is this genuine?” he asked.
The woman waited for the daughter to answer.
The mother called again. The daughter could hear the effort between the two parts of her name.
“Can you lift?” she asked the clerk.
“Is that a requirement?”
She took him into the bedroom. He looked at the woman in the bed, then at the paper the daughter still held. He began to explain about the board. Posts were removed by category. The number of views was not a decision. He could not have known—
“My hands are wet,” the daughter said. They were not.
He set down his pen. She showed him where to put his arms. Her mother weighed less than he had expected; he moved too quickly, and she caught his sleeve.
The daughter raised the pen over the two boxes.
Her mother would not let him proceed. “Ask me which side.”