One Day, Before Too Long by Kathryn Milam

Atlas is my true given name.

Until her last breath, my mama dreamed of the time she would leave this little nothing county and travel the world, especially to Wales, which is where her own mama said her people came from. She thought she would look up some of her relatives if she got there. When I was born, it’s told, she held her tattered book of maps close to her chest and said Atlas would be as good a name as any. So that’s what they called me.

For six months now, I get to the lady’s house at 4:45 in the afternoon to take over the night shift. I’m not due until 5, but I like coming in early so I can ask Carla, the day nurse, how the old woman is doing. Every single day, Carla says, “Atlas, law! I reckon she’s about the same.”

And that’s the best you can expect for somebody who’s had a bad stroke.

Carla and I, we aren’t real nurses, but out here where we live in these eastern Carolina swamplands, miles away from Norfolk and Virginia Beach or even Greenville, where they have actual medical facilities, we’re what you do when somebody’s sick and you have enough money to hire on help. And these people - this old man and this old lady - have plenty. Big house. Big cars. Land. Children and grandchildren who’ve stayed nearby to work in the family business.

My first chore is to feed the old lady and serve the old man what Carla’s cooked. Roast beef and gravy, maybe. Or fried chicken. Meatloaf on occasion. Meatloaf is good, since the old lady can manage that with her mashed carrots and creamed potatoes so full of milk you could slurp them through a straw. I like it when they have meatloaf. I always feel better when the old lady gets some protein.

The old man eats his supper at the dining room table, long and shining, dark wood polished to a fare-thee-well by Val, the woman who does the cleaning and washing. Supper is at 5:30 on the button. Always with a cloth and the good silverware and pretty dishes with mauve-colored rosebuds on them. I hook up a tray to the old lady’s wheelchair and give her her food in the kitchen where if she’s spills something, it’s easy to wipe up.

About the time she’s done, the old man always hollars at me, “Alice.” He can’t seem to get that my name’s not Alice. “Give her some of that lemon pudding Carla made (or chocolate or rice, whichever she’s decided on that day) and bring me a whiskey.” He says this every single night like I might forget.

I spoon the dessert into the old lady’s mouth, catch the dribbles that run down her chin threatening to spoil her pink dress or her pink tweed suit jacket or the pink paisley silk scarf tied around her neck in a fashionable knot. The old man likes to see her in pink and there really isn’t any other color in her closet, except a green knit two-piece that I put on her once and the old man said, “Harriet, green just isn’t your color,” which made the old lady cry. It don’t take much to make her cry. That’s the way it is with strokes.

My first night here, after they bring the old lady home from the hospital and we all are getting use to how things are and how things need to be, there on that first night, when I’m fixing to feed her supper, I tie a big ironed linen napkin with a fancy “L” monogramed in the corner around her shoulders, and the old man has a fit, saying “did you grow up in the woods somewhere with no training?” referring to the fact that according to him napkins are for laps and not necks. I want to say, yes, in fact, I did grow up in the woods. My mama had seven of us in two rooms, and what with daddy working at your mill making not nearly enough to feed us all and dress us all, we didn’t have time to learn about napkins. But I keep my mouth shut, glad to have his money and willing to keep my ideas to myself to get it, and pretty sure anyway he knows everything there is to know about my family, us living here in this tiny place and everybody knowing everybody else and everybody’s business. Not many can afford to pay for what I do when their old folks get sick. So jobs like this, you do what you can to keep them.

Mornings, so Carla tells me, the old lady’s daughter, a woman in her sixties like me, stops in around 9:30 to check on things. I wash and dress the old lady before I leave at 8. The old man can’t stand to have her in her night clothes much past breakfast. The daughter looks to see her mama’s hair is combed and her lipstick’s on straight or as straight as you can get it on a mouth that slants downward toward her neck in a droop of wrinkles. Once a week, the daughter polishes the old lady’s fingernails, pink, to match her clothes, but polish can only do so much on those knotted hands. She used to crochet all the time, I hear, which I guess caused her fingers to twist and cramp, and I do admire the afghans on the sofas and chairs and dresser scarves on the tables. It’s been a long time since she’s made anything, though. Now, all she can do is sit and cry, tears dripping spots on her blouse. That or say “wa-wa” if she wants a drink or “ba” if her diaper needs changing.

Nights, after supper, I push the old lady to the living room where the old man sits and smokes a cigar. He’s got the television on to the news and afterwards they watch Wheel of Fortune. This is when I eat my own supper and clean up the dishes and wash down the countertops. Once in a while, I take this time to make a cake - chocolate, lemon, or my favorite Lady Baltimore. I don’t like the flavor of that one so much as the name. Baltimore. It seems like a place I’d like to go. I don’t have to cook at all, but I like making cakes and the old man likes to eat them, and they have a pink-lacquered Mixmaster than spins the batter into glossy ribbons.

After their shows, I start getting the old lady ready for sleep. They’ve got a room on the first floor set up for her with a hospital bed and a toilet chair and a chest of drawers filled with pink nightgowns and hand-embroidered bed jackets. I try to let her pick out what she wants to wear, but all she can say is “eh-eh,” and throw her hand up a little when I pull them out for her to see. So far, she seems happy with whatever I choose, the satin-back flannel or the printed cotton or the deep salmon silk with sprays of white jasmine down the front. All these choices, nice as they are, make me sad. I don’t think I’d care one bit about a nightgown if I were in her place.

I give her a good sponge bath with lavender-smelling soap, scrub off what remains of her lipstick, try to brush her teeth. Once a week, Carla lays the old lady’s pills out in plastic containers marked with the day and time for taking - Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, morning, noon, night. She leaves them, ready, on a round table covered with a frilly cloth I expect the old lady herself hooked. She gets four tablets at bedtime. I don’t know what-all they’re for except for the purple one, which is especially important because that’s the one that helps her sleep. If she doesn’t sleep, I don’t sleep.

Most every night, right after the old man calls out, “Night, Harriet. You have a good night,” I read to her from the Bible. Just a few verses. We’re working on Job. Up to Book Four. “By the blast of God they perish, and by the breath of his nostrils are they consumed.” It’s a terrible situation Job faced, and maybe a right strange choice for a sick old woman with so many happy verses about Jesus and the multitudes in the New Testament. But I like Job. And I think his story has a real good message of hope no matter what happens to you.

I could go right to bed after I get her settled in. They’ve put a cot for me on the jalousied porch off her room where I can leave the door cracked open to hear her if she wakes up. A brown and white space heater sits in the corner for cool nights, and I’ve got a radio to listen to and a chair and a lamp if I want to look at the old lady’s magazines. She gets them all. Good Housekeeping. Southern Living. People. But, most times, she sleeps well enough, and I like to sit up a while and not go to bed any sooner than I have to.

There’s a little television in the kitchen so I go in there and watch a show or two. One channel has travel documentaries on Tuesday and Friday nights. I like them best. One time they visit France, and early on, they go to Seattle, Washington. They go to the Space Needle and a big market where they have all kinds of fruits and vegetables and big fish laying on ice, eyes glistening dead. They take us out on a boat and show us Mt. Rainier all covered with snow in the distance, and I think what I wouldn’t give to see a sight such as that.

The old man, after the old lady is asleep, watches a channel that has all western movies, and one night, after I’ve been here a while and things have kind of settled in, he calls me, and says, “Alice, bring that kitchen chair in here and look at this.” So I do. Bring the chair in. And from then on, ever since, we sit and watch cowboys ride the range on spotted ponies or shoot-em-up with evil criminals in dusty mining towns. Most of the actors I like. John Wayne. Robert Duvall. Sam Elliott. Some movies are old, in black and white. Newer ones have stars I’ve never heard of and those aren’t my favorites. I miss my travel shows, but it is good to have another breathing body in the room, even if neither of us ever says a word.

When the movie’s over, the old man says “Put that chair back and cut off the lights.” And I do. I’ve started watching him from the dark kitchen, where he can’t see me. I watch him when he climbs the stairs to his room, ever since that one time he caught his foot on a step and would have fallen if his hand hadn’t reached the rail in time. I watch him, just in case. I’m thinking he should get himself a cane. That, or sleep downstairs himself. I’m thinking one day he might fall and break his neck.

Twice a week, the daughter and her two brothers and their wives come to visit for exactly one hour at 6 o’clock. They sit in the living room and talk about who’s been sick and who’s died and do you reckon Mary Beth Harrison will ever get control of that son of hers. The daughter comes by herself, without a husband, and fusses over the old lady, fluffing her hair, trimming a hangnail, adjusting the clip-on earrings I always put on her. The daughter’s man ran off with a Sunday School teacher from the Methodist Church, and I hear she’s bitter about it. Bitterness can ruin you. I’ve seen it. It can make you care more about what your mama wears and how she looks than what she thinks. Even if she can’t say much. Even if she makes no sense.

One night, I hear them talking in there. One of the sons tries to convince his daddy to get a dog. “As protection,” he says. “Sleep in the kitchen. Bark at anyone who comes up.”

“Can’t keep a dog in the house,” the old man says. “Dogs and white coloreds (though he uses another word I won’t say), they belong in the yard.”

I feel right harsh toward him for a good while after that. He thinks just because we’re poor, we’re no better than black folks. But what I say is God made us all equal, black and white, and he’s got no right to put down any of us, regardless.

After they all leave, when he calls me to come on and see the television show, it’s all I can do to sit in my chair and not wish I was in that movie with a gun on my hip, ready and willing to shoot me a movie star.

*

When it gets toward Thanksgiving, the old man says he wants the whole family to come to the house for Thanksgiving dinner, and he puts Carla and Val in charge of the cooking. He wants me to be here that night, just like always, but he tells Carla and Val they can go on home after they lay out the turkey and dressing and sweet potatoes and three different kinds of pie. Val sets the dining room with gold-banded plates and cut crystal glasses, and she polishes all the silver, the knives and forks, the water pitcher, a big coffee pot on a tray, until they shine like a midnight moon.

Twelve people sit around the table, the old man and the old lady’s children and grandchildren and in-laws. I wheel the old lady’s chair right up to an end spot and push her in as close as I can. She can’t manage on her own, but I expect the daughter to help, if for no other reason than to keep the old lady’s new wine-colored suit and frothy pink blouse from getting soiled. I sit myself in the kitchen keeping an ear out in case they want something.

The old man says grace thanking God for family and food and health, and right after the “amen,” I hear him call me.

“Alice,” he says and I go in there. He points to an empty chair beside the old lady. I think he wants me to help her eat, but no, he says, “Get you a plate.”

I’m not sure what he means, and for a moment, I stand there like a stump not knowing which way to turn.

“Get you a plate,” he says again, so I go in the kitchen and bring back one of the plates they keep in a separate cupboard for us who work there to eat off of. “Get a good plate,” he says, and he indicates a stack of creamy white china on the sideboard.

I take one and sit down at the table, pick my napkin up and spread it across my lap. Somehow, food gets on my plate and the old lady’s, and I’m helping her, watching for spills, and dabbing a cloth at her mouth. Folks start talking, back and forth, laughing, a buzz of words in my head that don’t make sense since I can’t wrap my thinking around what’s going on and what I’m doing here at these folks’ table. I take a forkful of green bean casserole and raise it to my mouth, but I hardly believe I can swallow, what with the mess of confused butterflies flitting in my belly.

*

Two weeks after Thanksgiving, I’m putting up a little artificial Christmas tree in the corner of the old lady’s room while she sits cranked up in the bed watching me. She looks right pretty in her dark rose bed jacket, and I think I see some color in her cheeks that hasn’t been there before. I’m hanging the red and green shiny balls and stringing up multi-colored lights that twinkle if I push the right button on the control. I find an angel made from an embroidered handkerchief to stick on the top. And then I hear this gurgling kind of noise, and a “ha-rump,” and I look and just like that, the old lady’s dead.

After the funeral, the old man tells me he wants me to stay on for a while, like I’ve been doing. He’ll pay me the same, and we’ll see how it goes. It sounds fine to me, so I keep coming every day. I feed the old man his supper and pour his whiskey. I make cakes. We sit up late watching those cowboy movies, and afterwards, I go to my cot to sleep. In the mornings, I put on the coffee and fry up an egg and some sausage or bacon and sometimes make a pan of biscuits before I go home.

Around New Year’s, the old man calls me into the living room right before our show starts and says, “Alice, I’m going to give you Harriet’s car,” and just like that, he pulls out the papers, already signed and stamped, making me the owner of a pale silver Cadillac CTS sedan with less than 20,000 miles on the meter that nobody’s driven in months.

“Put your name here,” he says, and hands me a pen. I start to write “Alice,” when I notice the papers say my true name, Atlas Lovenia Smith, so I sign it just like usual, and sit myself down to watch that good-looking Steve McQueen and The Magnificent Seven for the second time.

I try to thank the old man, but he brushes me off with a wave of the remote, and I don’t get a word out.

*

I love this car. I drive it to the old man’s house every day, pull it into the carport right alongside his. He’s bumped my pay up a little to take care of the premium gas he tells me I must use if I want it to run smooth. I buy a cream-colored umbrella that matches the paint perfectly to keep in the door pocket for times when it rains.

One day before too long, I’m going to pack up my new car. I’m going to pack up my clothes and a cooler of sandwiches and what money I have, and I’m going to drive across the country to see some sights. The Smokey Mountains. Nashville, Tennessee. The Mississippi River. I’m going to drive and drive. I might drive all the way to Seattle and take an elevator right up to the top of the Space Needle. I’ll get up there and look back far to the east, back toward home, trying to see the miles I’ve covered and where all I’ve been. Afterwards, I’ll find that big market and buy me a box of bright red raspberries, and I’ll eat them on the boat tour of the Puget Sound.

That’s exactly what I’m going to do. One day before long. Sooner, maybe, rather than later. One day after the old man passes on, however that might be.

………………..

Kathryn Milam writes short fiction. She is recently published in Flash Fiction Magazine and Appalachian Heritage, with a forthcoming piece in Milk Candy Review. She graduated from the MFA program at Bennington College.

Twitter: @MilamKathryn