Chapter Three
Sophie
I held a bouquet of red carnations in my hand as I walked through the glass double doors and into a vestibule where the receptionist of the nursing home could see me. Recognizing me, she pushed a button, unlocking the doors and allowing me to enter.
The nursing home where my grandmother lived was a lock-down facility for the safety of the residents. Many of them had dementia, like my grandma, and couldn’t always remember where they were or even who they were. If someone suffering from memory loss were able to wander outside, they’d probably get lost and possibly hurt in the process.
The locked door was one of the reasons I chose this place ten months ago, not long after I started working at Renshaw Manufacturing, when it became clear to me that it was time to put my grandma in a home. She had started to show signs of forgetfulness and confusion, but it didn’t happen often. She was still living on her own, in the same house where she raised me. Then, she nearly burned the place down when she started to make herself a grilled cheese sandwich and went into the living room to watch a soap opera. Forgetting all about her meal, she fell asleep in her recliner and woke up to the sound of her smoke detector going off and a haze of smoke in the house.
The neighbor was an old friend that had promised to keep an eye on her, and I was never more grateful for him than that day as he was working outside in the yard and heard the alarm. He got the blackened sandwich off the stove and opened the windows to air the place out. But most importantly, he calmed my grandmother down. She was a mess, confused and upset.Scared.
That was when I realized that the occasional bouts of forgetfulness were more serious—and definitely more dangerous—than I thought. The doctor ran a few tests and determined that she had dementia, as well as a vitamin deficiency because she wasn’t eating right or taking proper care of herself.
I was faced with a hard decision. I could have moved her into my place, but I worked a lot, and she needed someone to keep an eye on her. Having a nurse stay at the house all day would have cost a fortune.
The other option was putting her in this nursing home. It also cost a ton of money, but at least I knew that there was a team of people here around the clock to keep her safe. It was hard to come to terms with the whole thing, but I truly believed that she was in the best place for her.
Now, my big concern was paying for it. I’d already had to sell her house, my childhood home, to help cover the expense of the nursing home. It turned out that she’d taken out a second mortgage about eight years ago, which I suspected was to help pay for my college tuition, so I didn’t walk away with nearly as much from the sale as I had hoped. Now, I was trying to pay my bills and her monthly fee to live here with my paycheck. It was part of the reason that I worked my butt off for Connor, always willing to pull overtime and do whatever might get me a bonus or maybe a raise when I reached the one-year anniversary of being on the job.
Still, I was struggling.
But I figured that was only fair. I was sure that it had been a struggle for her to raise me all by herself after my single mother died when I was only a year old. I owed this woman everything. She was the only family that I had, as far as I knew. I didn’t know anything about my dad, other than the fact that he was a man my mom dated for a while until she ended up pregnant. Then, he pulled a disappearing act and never looked back.Jerk.
Walking down the hallway, I followed the familiar route to my grandmother’s room. The facility tried to make sure that the individual suites were as comfortable as possible, with homey touches. In my grandma’s room, I’d hung her cross on the wall and placed a crocheted blanket on her bed. There were pictures of me and my mom—separate and together—and her old recliner set up where she could watch her afternoon soaps on TV.
When I walked in, that was where she was, her eyes glued to the screen. The flowers I had brought her last week still sat in a vase on top of her dresser. They were starting to wilt, so I crossed the room to replace them.
“Hi, Grandma,” I said as I passed by her, and she jumped, startled.
“Oh, there you are,” she said, placing a hand on her chest, over her heart.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“It’s fine.” She waved a hand dismissively and reached over to grab the remote and turn down the TV. “But I wanted to talk to you, Judy.”
My heart felt like it was being squeezed in a vice as she called me by my mother’s name. This was the third time that my grandma had done this, and I had learned to just go with it. I tried to correct her at first, to explain that I was Judy’s daughter. I’d practically begged her to remember raising me. After all, she was the only mother I’d ever really known. But that was a disaster. She’d gotten upset, and demanded to know where her daughter was. When I’d made the horrible mistake of telling her that Judy was dead, her reaction was so out-of-control that I’d been told it would be best to leave for the day.
I cried in my car in the parking lot and promised myself that I would never argue with her about my name again. It wasn’t worth it.
“Is something wrong?” I asked, tossing the old flowers in the trash. She’d always loved carnations and liked to keep them in the house when I was growing up. So, I had taken that over to help make this place feel a bit like home.
“It’s my hair,” she said, absently patting the side of her head. “It’s completely out of control, and I can’t find the number of the girl that cuts it. Can you help me?”
The facility had an on-site beautician, and I had arranged for her to get a haircut and style just last week. The short, grey curls were far from out-of-control, but I just smiled and nodded.
“How about I give her a call for you?” I suggested, knowing that she probably wouldn’t remember this conversation once I was gone. I could tell that this was one of her bad days.
My grandmother smiled at me, though her eyes seemed vacant. “Thank you, dear.”
She turned back to the TV, and I straightened up the room, organizing her books on her small bookshelf and pulling a knitted blanket out of her closet to add to her bed, since I knew that it got cold at night. I was smoothing it with the palm of my hand when there was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” I called out.
It was the business manager, Cindy Shull. I let out a small sigh at the sight of her. She was a nice woman, always smartly dressed in business suits and very polite, but seeing her always filled me with dread because she was the person responsible for collecting payments.
“Sophie, how are you?” she asked, her smile not quite reaching her eyes, which looked troubled.
Crap.