Nicole Myers

&More--Sept/Oct 2014

Have One, Take Two

Nicole Myers

“Have one, take two, they’re small,” the elderly woman said, pushing the open tin of Danish butter cookies across the scarred oak table to her granddaughter.

“Grandma, I just ate!” Katie said as she reached for the lid and placed it firmly over the top. She ate the last bite of her takeout chef salad and pushed the empty plastic bowl back into the paper sack.

“You’re getting too skinny,” Ella said, squinting at Katie with eyes clouded from decades-old cataracts. “You’ve been working too hard.”

“You can’t even see me.”

“I can see you just fine and you are too skinny. You need to eat more.” With shaky hands, Ella picked up the tin and shoved it toward her. Katie took one and chewed it slowly, not sure where to start.

“Grandma. I know that we’ve been talking about this for a while and you kept saying we’d cross the bridge when we came to it, but I think we’re there. Andrea said when she came to visit a few days ago you’d accidentally turned the stove on and didn’t even realize it.”

“Those buttons are too easy to push,” she said, looking in the general direction of the old white range that took up a quarter of the tiny galley style kitchen in her apartment. “I unplugged the stove. I don’t use it anyways.”

That was true – her freezer was filled with individual Hungry Man TV dinners.

“But if you’d put something down on the burners, you could have burned your apartment down. Or at the very least, you could have injured yourself. We don’t feel comfortable with you living here alone anymore.”

“Who’s we? Your mom and you, or both of your sisters too? I’m 96, I’ve been taking care of myself since your grandfather died 44 years ago. I never even see anyone unless it’s convenient for you all.” Ella’s voice shook and she turned her head away from Katie. “I spend more time talking back to the radio show hosts than I do with you. What right do you have?” She slowly pushed herself up from the table and clumsily positioned her walker in front of her before shuffling her slippered feet down the hallway.

“Please, just think about it,” Katie called out to her grandmother’s retreating form. Tears started to drip down her cheeks and she wiped at them with a tissue from one of the Kleenex boxes that adorned a surface in every room. “We’re really worried.”

Ella turned around in the dimly lit hallway. A narrow beam of light from the kitchen revealed eyes bright with her own tears. “Please go, just go.”

Ella heard the door close behind Katie as she entered her bedroom and sat down on the afghan covered double bed.

She picked up a framed black and white photo of a middle-aged man and lovingly stroked his face with her thumb. “Oh Arnold, what should I do? The girls think I’m not able to live on my own anymore, and maybe I’m not. But at least here I’m independent. Lonely, but I can do things my own way.” She sighed before putting the frame back on the dresser. “I wish you were here, I miss you terribly.”

A week later, Katie received the dreaded phone call from her mother.

“Grandma’s in the hospital.”

“What happened?” Katie’s heart and stomach twisted sharply and her breath suddenly seemed to come in short spurts. Any time a senior citizen needed to be admitted to the hospital, it wasn’t good news.

“Lindsay went to visit her after work and found her lying on the bathroom floor. Grandma said she was trying to reach something on the rug and her legs just gave out. Linds called 911 and the paramedics said it looked like she broke a hip. The orthopedic surgeon is supposed to be here in a few minutes. She has a fever and they think she may have been dizzy and disoriented when she fell. They aren’t sure what’s wrong. You’d better come, she’s at Mercy Hospital in room 814.” She paused for a minute, and Katie heard voices in the background, “Katie, I’ve got to go, I think the doctor’s here.”

At the hospital, Katie parked crookedly in the first spot she could find and half ran, half walked into the hospital. After winding her way through the labyrinth of hospital corridors, she found the elevator to the appropriate wing. A handwritten sign on the elevator stated it was temporarily out of order. A gentleman in his 60’s wearing a hospital badge and pushing a mop across the floor noticed her reading the sign and stopped what he was doing.

“Do you need some help Miss?”

“Yes, I’m trying to get to the 8th floor to see my grandmother.” Panic rose in her throat at the thought of losing Grandma Ella. It was difficult to imagine life without her. Happy childhood memories of weekends at Grandma’s house in Seattle flooded her mind. The janitor gave Katie directions to the nearest operable elevator and she made her way to the hospital room as if in a daze.

Andrea and their mother stood in the entrance to Grandma Ella’s room, their other sister Lindsay sat at Ella’s bedside, talking to her in a low voice.

Swiping at her face with a wad of Kleenex, Katie’s mother said, “They’ve given her antibiotics and some morphine. The fever is almost gone, but she’s still in a lot of pain from the hip fracture. She’s responsive but drifting in and out of sleep,”

Katie walked over to where Grandma Ella lay. Underneath the sheet, Ella’s form was much smaller than Katie would have thought, and she looked like she had aged twenty years in the week since she’d last seen her. Lindsay got up and walked over to where the rest of the family stood.

“Hi Katie,” Grandma said. “What do you think of the accommodations? If I’d known I would get such attention, I would have fallen years ago. It’s like Club Med here.” She shifted slightly and winced in pain.

“Well, I’m glad to see you’re feeling better.” Katie felt her body relax a little. If Grandma was joking around, that was a good sign. “I hear they’re going to be fixing up your hip. Soon you’ll be good as new. You always said you wanted the body of a 20 year old, now you’ll get a chance to have at least one body part back to factory mint condition.” Katie tried to make her words light, but her tight grip on Ella’s hand belied her fear.

“Honey, don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” Ella said, squeezing Katie’s hand back. “The Grim Reaper isn’t getting me today.”

The next day, as Katie walked down the corridor to Ella’s hospital room, she could hear her grandmother shouting.

“I’m not going to a rehabilitation facility. I don’t need that garbage. I’m going back to my own apartment. I’ll hire someone to help me with things.”

“Mother, you can’t be on your own, you need to learn how to walk again with the new hip. You’ll only be there for a short while,” Katie’s mother said from the foot of Ella’s bed. She heard her daughter’s footsteps and turned around. “Katie, I have to go make some phone calls, I’ll be back in half an hour. Try to talk some sense into your grandmother while I’m gone.”

“Grandma, how’s it going?” Katie asked. She bent down and kissed her wrinkled forehead. If possible, Ella looked even older than the day before, although her face was flushed with anger.

“Your mother wants to put me in a home.” She spat out the words. “I’ll die in a home.”

“I’m sure she’s only trying to help, Grandma.” Katie reached into her oversized leather satchel and pulled out a small container of Pepperkaker, her grandmother’s favorite cookie. “I brought these for you. Are you allowed to eat one?”

“I’ll eat whatever I darn well want. When those doctors are 96, they can tell me what I can or can’t eat,” she said, automatically reaching for the thin ginger cookies and tearing open the paper box with arthritic hands. Before even selecting one for herself, generations of Norwegian hospitality kicked in. She thrust the box at her eldest granddaughter, “Have one, take two, they’re small.”

Katie complied.

Ella’s mouth full of Pepperkaker, said, “How long do I need to go there for? Anna Linton went in to a home and died within a month.” She brushed crumbs away from her mouth, her face etched with deep lines of worry.

“I don’t know Grandma, a couple months maybe?” Katie didn’t have the heart to tell her she’d probably be living in the assisted living facility for the rest of her life.

“Hrmph,” Ella said, tucking the cookie box into a drawer of her bedside tray table. “One little fall and this is what happens to me. At least I didn’t have a heart attack on the crapper.”

A few weeks later, Katie visited Ella in her room at the assisted living facility. They’d been able to get her in to a place offering physical rehabilitation while allowing her to reside in a private studio apartment. When she’d visited her the week before, Ella’s clothes had hung on her gaunt frame and she refused to speak more than a few words to Katie before turning her recliner around to gaze out the window.

“Knock, knock,” Katie said, rapping gently on Ella’s room door as she slowly pushed it open. Not sure what she would find, she was surprised by the sounds of rapid chatter floating out of the room.

At the small dining room table pushed against the kitchen wall, Grandma Ella sat with a folded newspaper crossword puzzle in one hand and a pen in the other. Across from her, a woman with tightly curled snowy white hair drank coffee out of a blue ceramic mug. A plate-sized tin sat on the table between them. When they heard Katie enter the room, the women turned in their chairs to see the visitor.

At the sight of her granddaughter, Grandma Ella’s face lit up. “Katie. I’m so glad to see you.” She motioned at the woman across the table. “This is my new friend Agnes. She lost her husband decades ago too and we’ve been working on a crossword puzzle together. Agnes knows the names of all the Oscar winners from the last few decades.”

Katie walked over to the table and held out her hand to Agnes. “Well, that is a useful skill in this game. It’s very nice to meet you.”

“Pleased to meet you too. Your grandmother and I are really knocking out this puzzle. Would you like to join us?” Agnes shook Katie’s hand and gestured at a wooden chair resting against the other wall.

“Katie is a crossword puzzle enthusiast too. She gets all the hard ones,” Grandma Ella bragged to Agnes.

“You trained me well.” Katie smiled at her grandmother.

“Oh, where are my manners?” Grandma Ella said, opening up the jewel toned tin to reveal homemade chocolate chip cookies. “Agnes made these for me. Have one, take two, they’re small.”