Mickey:Go to the garden supply place tomorrow morning. Buy the bamboo. If the driftwood shows up, great. If it doesn’t, you’re covered. The candle thing, tell the mother you’ll use LED candles in glass cylinders. They look real in photos and the wind can’t touch them. Blame it on the venue’s fire safety policy. Nobody argues with a fire safety policy.
Benji:Are you... wedding planning from your hospital bed right now?
Mickey:I’m a cop. We solve problems under pressure. This is basically the same skill set except nobody’s armed.
Benji:You haven’t met Callie’s mother.
At five, I finish the last vendor call, get in my car and call him. “Are you free to talk?” I ask.
“You bet,” he says. “Are you on the road headed this way?”
“I’m leaving now.”
“Okay, that’ll give us plenty of time to work through the issues you were having today with the wedding. What do you tackle first?”
It’s almost seven by the time I’m knocking on his door. I walk into the room and the tightness in my body loosens the way it does every time I see him.
He takes one look at me and frowns. “Sit down, Benji,” he says.
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. Sit down and drink something before you pass out in my room and hit your head on the floor. When’s the last time you ate?”
“I had a protein bar.”
“When?”
“This morning.”
“It’s seven o’clock at night, Benji.”
“I didn’t have time today.”
“Open Sheila’s cooler then and let’s eat.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, frowning. “Didn’t you eat that food earlier today? You were supposed to eat the leftovers for lunch.”
Sheila’s cooler is still sitting on the nearby table from last night. He gestures at it. I reach for it and unzip it. The food is all still there. Every container. Untouched. The ice packs have melted and nothing has been opened.
He hasn’t eaten any of it. Not a bite.
The cooler has been sitting nearby all day, two feet from his bed, filled with his favorite foods that he loves and he couldn’t reach it. He couldn’t lean over far enough to unzip it and pull out a container because his body doesn’t bend that way from this position. Nobody came in to help him. The nurses were too busy doing rounds to notice that a man in their care had a cooler full of food that he could see and not reach.
“I thought you were going to ask the morning nurse to help you with it,” I say, my voice cracking as I look at the melted ice packs.
“I meant to,” Mickey says. “And then the shift changed, and it was busy, and I figured I wasn’t that hungry anyway.”
He’s lying. He was hungry. He just didn’t want to ring the call button for help. He didn’t want to be a burden over food.
The tears come before I can stop them, sudden and hot. I’m standing there holding the open cooler with tears running down my face because the image of Mickey lying in this bed all day, hungry, with Tex’s food right there and not being able to get to it is more than I can handle.
“Benji...”
“No,” I say, and my voice is shaking and I don’t care. “No. This is exactly why someone needs to be here with you. Not for a fucking hour a day. All day. This is exactly why family needs to be with people in the hospital, Mickey, because the staff can’t do everything, and they miss things. And you sit here all day with food you can’t reach and you don’t callanyone because you don’t want to be a burden and that is exactly the kind of bullshit that...” I wipe my face with the back of my hand and take a breath that hurts my ribs. “That’s why I need to be here. If your mom can’t be here and Tex can’t be here every day, then I need to be here. Because this can’t happen again. I can’t stand the thought of you needing something and nobody is here.”
Mickey is quiet. He doesn’t know what to do with me crying over the fact that he didn’t eat lunch. But somebody needs to take care of him. Not the nurses. Somebody who shows up because they want to, not because it’s their job.
Mickey needs to be taken care of. Damn it, this upsets me. I start pulling containers out, opening lids, smelling everything frantically. I’ve shifted into caregiver mode and can’t turn it off. The brisket, ribs and the cornbread are all fine. Smoked meat can sit at room temperature for a bit without killing anyone, that’s the whole point of smoking it. But the coleslaw, I pop the lid and the smell hits me and I snap it shut.
