There Was an Old Woman

Chapter Forty-six


“For heaven’s sakes, we’ll get you another pair of glasses, Aunt Mina,” Brian said. “Would you stop fretting about them already? It’s not a big deal.”

It was a big deal. Mina was belted into the front seat of Brian’s car, her handbag clutched in her lap. The world whizzing by through the window was a blur. Brian, sitting not three feet away from her, was featureless. If she hadn’t recognized the voice coming out of his mouth, and that distinctive smell of whatever cologne it was that he slathered on himself, she’d have had no idea who was driving.

The car came to a halt. “Where are we?” Mina asked.

“Stopped at a light.”

As if she didn’t know that. After a minute, the car accelerated up an incline, fast. Mina assumed they were on the highway now.

“Now we’re on the Bruckner,” Brian confirmed.

Mina held on to the door handle as the car moved into the left lane and sped along. The car shuddered rhythmically over seams in the pavement. The vibrations made her hip ache. She could feel the changes in pressure as they passed cars and trucks.

By the time Brian pulled up in front of her house, Mina was wrung out. She was desperate for a quiet cup of tea, her own chair, and another of those painkillers they’d given her in the hospital.

A medium-sized white box truck was parked in front of the house. Brian pulled up parallel to it and rolled down the window. “Yo! How’s it going?” he called out.

“We should have it done by the end of the day,” the answer came back. A man’s voice, though to Mina the man himself was nothing more than a tall dark shadow.

Brian pulled his car into the driveway. Mina squinted. It looked like another man was carrying something inside.

“What’s going on?” Mina said.

“The social worker at the hospital told me that the house—the bathroom in particular—isn’t properly set up for you. With the walker, you can barely get in the room. If you end up in a wheelchair, you wouldn’t be able to get through the door. That got me thinking about turning the upstairs into a master suite with its own bath. So that’s what they’re building for you. Wide doorway. Roll-in shower. Grab bars. Slip-proof floor.”

Mina snorted. Sounded like the spiel she’d heard when the woman in the blue suit had shown them one of the rooms at Pelham Manor.

Brian ignored her. “Once it’s done, your health aide can sleep downstairs. We’ll see how it goes, and if we need to install a lift on the stairs, we’ll do that.”

Second-floor bath? Live-in health aide? Stair lift? “How much is all this going to cost?”

“A lot less than the cost of a residential setting, and your insurance will pay for most of it. They’ll be using a prefab unit for the bathroom so it won’t take long to finish the work. Dora will sleep upstairs until the new bath is done and you can move up.”

“Dora?”

“The hospital referred her. Dora . . . Fleischer I think is her last name. I hired her to help you.” Without waiting for a response, Brian got out of the car, popped the trunk, and came around to her side and opened the door. He unfolded the walker and set it up for her. “What’s the matter? I thought you’d be pleased.”

Well, she was and she wasn’t. She was pleased to be home. But strangers were in her house. Leaving the door wide open. Tramping up and down her staircase in their work boots. Breaking apart the upstairs bedroom. Had Brian forgotten he didn’t own the house? Not yet, at least.

But Mina didn’t say anything. Just pushed against the dashboard and shifted her feet out, tried to stand, and then grudgingly took Brian’s offered hand and slid out of the car. She gritted her teeth against the pain. The doctor had said she’d feel a lot better a week from now when the swelling went down. As it was, it was slow going pushing the walker up the front walk. Brian helped her climb the front steps.

Inside, the house smelled of plaster dust and overworked electrical tools. As she shuffled across the kitchen floor, Mina felt as if her feet were leaving streaks in a coating of dust. Just as well that she couldn’t see. She’d have been desperate to clean, and until the work was done, “clean” would be an uphill battle. Besides, the doctor had said in no uncertain terms there was to be no stooping or bending, not until the physical therapist who’d be coming to the house gave her permission.

“Where are my rugs?” Mina asked as Brian helped her across the bare floor to the living room.

“Rolled up and put away,” he said. “You can bring them back when the construction is finished and you don’t need to use the walker any longer.” They’d reached her chair. He helped her turn around. She felt behind her for the seat cushion. Then, holding on to him, she lowered herself into the chair. This was going to get old fast.

Mina shivered with cold. Brian found her sweater and helped her on with it. Later, even with a mug of hot tea, the crocheted spread piled over her, and the sun shining in through the windows, Mina still felt chilled. She wished Ivory would come out of hiding.



All day long, Brian kept going upstairs to supervise, as he called it, the construction. Noise went on unabated, banging and sawing and drilling and hammering, with workers—there had to be at least three of them—marching in and out. It sounded as if they were taking the house apart. Brian explained that the banging and clattering she heard was a chute they’d set up to carry away rubble and debris. They had better not be burying her lovely lacecap hydrangeas.

She’d had to remind Brian to call and order her another pair of prescription glasses. She listened as he made the call, gave them her name and her prescription number. Of course they no longer carried anything like her old frames, but Brian said the woman he talked to on the phone had promised to do her best to come close. Fortunately, ’50s fashions were apparently back.

While Brian was on one of his supervisory forays upstairs, Mina made her way to what she was already thinking of as the “downstairs” bath. He was right. She had to leave the walker in the hall.

She washed her face. All that noise had given her a headache, and the hot washcloth felt soothing. Then she took a capsule of pain medication—Brian had filled the prescription at the hospital and the container was on the sink. She’d had a dose before breakfast in the hospital. She couldn’t read the label, but she remembered what the doctor had said: no more than once every six hours and take it with food.

In the kitchen she started to put together a light lunch for herself. But as she stood there waiting for the toast to pop, the room felt as if it was spinning. By the time Brian found her, she’d collapsed in the kitchen chair and the toast had gone cold in the toaster.

“What are you doing in here? I could have gotten you lunch. I told you, let me help you.”

He walked her into the living room and settled her in her chair again. A while later he brought her lunch on a tray. Mina had taken a few nibbles of cottage cheese on toast and a bite of what she’d thought was canned peaches but turned out to be apricots, when she started to feel warm and drowsy. The headache had gone from sharp to fuzzy.

She took a few more bites and set the tray on the table. Brian plumped a pillow behind her and, despite all the noise coming from upstairs, she nodded off.