On Mondays, my only real day off from the restaurant, I visit the home. Technically, Magnolia Manor Assisted Living is a “managed-care community,” but in reality, it’s an old folks’ home. A very fancy, very expensive old folks’ home, where my grandparents, Spencer and Lorena Loudermilk, have been living for the past three years.
Granddaddy met me at the door to the trim little stucco cottage he and my grandmother share. He wore a pair of faded red sweatpants, a plaid flannel work shirt, and a Georgia Tech golf visor. His huge feet were stuffed, sockless, into unlaced work boots. He peered down at me for a moment through thick bifocals, his clear blue eyes sparkling once he realized who I was.
“Sugarpie!” he exclaimed, folding his long, thin arms around me. “When did you get back?”
“Back?” I blinked. “Granddaddy, I haven’t been anywhere to come back from.”
“Europe,” he said. “Your brother told me you were in Europe for two weeks.”
“Which brother?” I asked.
“You know,” he said. “The one with the hair.”
I have six brothers, and the last time I checked, they all had hair. Granddaddy was terrible with names. But my oldest brother is the only one of the whole useless bunch who ever bothers to call or visit my grandparents, so it was a good guess that was who he was referring to.
“Arch? Did Arch come to visit? How nice!”
“Arch,” Granddaddy said, nodding happily. “He’s a hairy sumbitch, isn’t he?”
“Granddaddy! I think Arch is very nice looking. His beard makes him look distinguished.”
“Hairy like an ape,” Granddaddy insisted. “He doesn’t get that from the Loudermilk side of the family. Your mother’s people were a hairy bunch though. There was an uncle of hers I met one time looked just like that Rasputin fella over there in Russia. But Ellen didn’t have hair like that. Or maybe she just shaved, and I never noticed.”
“No,” I said, giggling. “I don’t think Mama had an unusual amount of hair.” We’d been talking as I followed him into the abbreviated living room, which was crammed with dark, ornate mahogany furniture, an overstuffed sofa, and a huge console television set, which, as far as I knew, was only ever turned to the weather channel or the stock market channel, with the volume cranked up high.
I grabbed the remote control from the armrest of Granddaddy’s BarcaLounger, and ratcheted the volume way, way down.
“Where’s Grandmama?” I asked, peeking around the corner into the kitchenette. An open jar of peanut butter was sitting on the dinette table, with a huge serving spoon stuck into it. The table was littered with candy wrappers and dirty plates and cups. “She’s not napping this early in the day, is she?”
“Who?” Granddaddy asked, plopping down into his chair.
“Grandmama,” I said, trying to be patient. “Your wife, Lorena. Is she asleep?”
“How should I know?” he said, looking annoyed. “Ask the nurse.”
“Nurse?” I pushed open the door to the bedroom, but the bed, though slightly rumpled, was made, and empty. “What nurse? Granddaddy, where’s Lorena?”
He made a vague jabbing gesture with his finger. “Over there.”
“Where over there?” I sat down on the arm of his chair and grasped his hand.
“You know,” he said, leaning forward to get a better view of the television, which I was blocking. “Over there in the building.”
I took the remote control and snapped off the television. “Granddaddy! Please. What building? Where did Lorena go? Can you tell me?”
“Hell, yes, I can tell you,” he exploded. “Think I’m senile? Like I said, she’s over there in that big building, over yonder. You know. The place. The doctor says she can’t come home until she pees better.”
“The hospital?” I asked, still groping for understanding. “Are you telling me Grandmama is in the hospital? When did this happen?”
“How should I know?” Granddaddy said. “I can’t keep track of all the comings and goings around here. All I know is, I ain’t had a hot meal since who knows when.”
I took my cell phone out of my purse and called my brother Arch, praying that he would be at his desk.
“Arch? It’s BeBe. I’m at the home with Granddaddy. Do you know anything about Grandmama going into the hospital?”
“Nooo,” he said cautiously. “I saw her last week, Sunday maybe. She seemed fine. A little ditsy, but no more than usual. Is that what Granddaddy is telling you?”
“I think so,” I said with a sigh. “She’s definitely not here. The bed hasn’t been slept in, the kitchen’s a mess, and I think he’s been living off peanut butter and Kit Kat bars.”
“Christ,” Arch said. “What are you going to do?”
I bit my lip. What was I going to do? What was he going to do? For that matter, what was anybody else in the family going to do? Who died and left me in charge?
“I’m here,” I said finally. “I’ll call over to the infirmary and see if they have her there.”
“Fine,” Arch said. “Look, I’m sorry, but I’ve got a meeting in five. Call me and let me know if you find her.”
I hung up, found the number for the Magnolia Manor infirmary, and after fifteen minutes on hold, ascertained that yes, indeed, Mrs. Lorena Loudermilk had been admitted to the infirmary three days ago, with a bladder infection.
“This is her granddaughter,” I said, letting my voice go deliberately cold and imperious. “I had no idea she was ill. My grandfather has been living alone for the past three days, not eating, and probably not sleeping, either. Why wasn’t the family informed that she was being admitted to the hospital?”
“Can’t say,” the woman said. And she clearly didn’t care that she couldn’t say, either. “You’d have to ask her doctor.”
“I’ll do just that,” I said grimly.
“Granddaddy,” I said brightly. “Let’s go visit Grandmama in the hospital, want to?”
“Maybe later,” he said, glancing up at the clock on the living-room wall. “It’s time for the Rukeyser report.”
“I think we’d better go now,” I said, tugging gently on his arm. “You can watch television later.”
I dug the key to the bungalow out of my purse and locked the door behind us. “It’s too cold to walk over to the main building,” I told my grandfather. I pointed toward the white Lexus parked in the visitor’s slot. “I’m parked right there.”
“And I’m parked right there,” Granddaddy said, pointing proudly to a white Lincoln Town Car parked beside mine.
He took a set of keys from the pocket of the red sweatpants and jingled them excitedly. “After the hospital, we can go get some ice cream. Just like when you were a little girl.”
I walked over to the driver’s side of the Lincoln and gazed, speechlessly, at the sticker pasted to the window. I was looking at a brand-new top-of-the-line car, for which somebody had paid $42,698.
Granddaddy mashed the automatic lock button on the car, and held open the passenger door. “After you,” he said proudly.
The paper mats were still on the floor of the car, and the leatherette owner’s manual was sitting on the seat. I glanced over at the odometer, which read 14.7 miles.
“Granddaddy,” I said, when he got in. “Where did you get this car?”
“Mitchell Motors, same as always,” he said, running his hands over the smooth leather upholstery. “I been trading with the Mitchells since 1964. Nice folks.”
“This car cost nearly $43,000,” I said, my voice shaking. “How did you pay for it?”
“Cash money,” Granddaddy said. “Same as always.”
“But, where did you get the cash?” I asked, trying to stay calm. I’d been taking care of my grandparents’ financial affairs ever since they’d moved into Magnolia Manor. We had a joint custodial checking account, and I paid all their monthly bills, leaving them with a monthly stipend of cash to pay for groceries and miscellaneous items like Grandmama’s hairdresser and the occasional bottle of Scotch for Gran
ddaddy. As far as I knew, there was never any more than a couple hundred dollars in cash around the house.
He waved his hand. “Oh, I wrote one of them checks you left in the bureau drawer.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. The previous month, I’d left the checkbook for their money-market account in a bureau drawer in the bedroom, after paying all their bills. I had no idea Granddaddy was aware the checkbook was there.
“You wrote a check for $43,000,” I said flatly.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said happily. He poked aimlessly at the Lincoln’s console with the key, trying to find the ignition.
“Damnit,” he said. “Gotta have a college degree to start these new cars.”
With one poke, the Lincoln’s moon roof slid silently open. Another poke and our seat slid into a nearly reclining position. With another poke, an unseen voice filled the car’s pristine white interior.
“OnStar,” a silky woman’s voice said.
“What?” Granddaddy said, whipping his head around to find the source of the voice. “What’s that?”
“OnStar,” the woman repeated.
“Who are you?” Granddaddy demanded.
“OnStar Roadside Assistance,” she said calmly. “Sir, are you all right?”
He considered the question for a few seconds.
“I’m okay,” he said finally. “But Lorena’s having female problems.”
“Sir?” the woman said blankly.
“He’s fine,” I said. “False alarm.” I leaned over and mashed the OnStar button.
“She sounds nice,” Granddaddy said. He started the ignition and beamed with pride. “Where to, sugarpie?”
It took my grandfather approximately fifteen minutes to back up the boat-size Lincoln and maneuver it the half block to Magnolia Manor’s administration building. We took the elevator up to the third floor and wound through a white-tiled corridor and through a set of double doors marked INFIRMARY.
“She’s sleeping,” said the nurse at the infirmary desk. “Mrs. Loudermilk likes her nap in the afternoon.”
“I’m sure she does,” I said. “But I need to see her and talk to her. We won’t take long.”
A wall-mounted television droned from the tiny waiting area near the desk. Granddaddy sank down into a chair with his eyes riveted on the set. “I’ll wait here,” he said happily.
The nurse pulled back the curtains surrounding the last of three cubicles in the ward. My grandmother was curled up on her side, eyes closed, her toothless mouth agape. A pale blue sheet was pulled up around her neck, and a thin plastic tube ran from an IV stand beside the bed to her toothpick-thin arm, and another tube ran from beneath the sheet to a catheter bag on the lower rung of the stand.
“Antibiotics,” the nurse whispered. “Her urine output is much better. The doctor thinks he can remove the catheter by the weekend.”
I curled my fingers around my grandmother’s blue-tinged wrist. It was so thin I could have wrapped them around twice, I thought. I felt hot tears on my cheeks.
I’d seen my grandmother only a week ago, but in that time, it seemed Lorena Loudermilk had abandoned the body I’d known and loved all my life. This shrunken wisp was nobody I recognized.
“What else?” I asked, turning to the nurse. “What else is wrong with her? She wasn’t this bad a week ago. I just saw her. We played Parcheesi, and she beat me, same as always. She fixed me soup for lunch.”
The nurse shrugged. “Bladder infection is all I know about. She’s a sweet little lady. Never complains.”
I stared at her. Sweet? Never complains? There was something very, very wrong here. My grandmother was a pistol. She and my grandfather had been married fifty-seven years, and she had complained about something every day of her life. Lorena Loudermilk was a complicated, wonderful, exasperating presence. Sweet little lady my ass.
5
I had a pad of paper and a basket of pill bottles I’d gathered from around my grandparents’ cottage, and I was jotting down the names of all my grandmother’s prescriptions. Digoxin. Lasix. Flagyl. Cipro. Vicodin. Atavan. Ambien. “Does Grandmama take all of these pills every day?” I asked my grandfather, squinting at the expiration date on the Digoxin bottle.
“How the hell do I know?” he asked, involved in a swirling white mass on the weather channel, which indicated some kind of storm in Minnesota.
I sighed. With my grandmother in the hospital, and granddaddy apparently subsisting on peanut butter and Kit Kat bars, it was clear that it was time for an intervention.
“Would it be all right if I stayed over here for a couple of days?” I asked meekly.
He shrugged, not taking his eyes off the television. “Suit yourself. Don’t see why you’d want to, when you got that nice house one of those husbands of yours bought you.”
“Right,” I said slowly. It would do no good to point out to him that I’d bought the town house on West Jones Street, as well as three other downtown rental properties, all by myself.
My parents had started their own real estate agency, Loudermilk & Associates, in the 1970s, and Mama, especially, had always preached the value of home ownership. With her scouting out properties for me before they were even listed, I’d managed to buy my first house, at the age of twenty-two, a hideous red brick two-bedroom ranch house on the Southside that had been repossessed by the bank, for $48,000.
Mama had fronted me $5,000 for the down payment, and cosigned the mortgage on that first house, but after that, I’d flown solo as far as home buying went. I’d fixed up the ranch—doing most of the work myself—and flipped it two years later, making a tidy $30,000 profit, and immediately plowed that money into my next project—a dilapidated wood-frame bungalow on East Sixty-seventh Street.
Since that initial ugly-duckling ranch, I’d bought and sold nearly a dozen houses, and each house had been more desirable—and expensive, and successively closer to the downtown historic district, where it had been my goal to live ever since I was a little girl.
The West Jones Street town house was actually one of a pair of mirror-image row houses, built of beautiful old Savannah gray bricks in 1853 by a wealthy local cotton merchant for his twin sons. When Mama had first spotted my house, it was so dilapidated that a ten-foot-tall mimosa tree was growing through the roof of what had once been the kitchen. I’d hated the house at first sight, but Mama had insisted it was a diamond in the rough—not to mention the cheapest house in the historic district, priced at $450,000.
Jones Street was a money pit. It had taken me five years to make it the showplace it now was, and during that time I had survived two divorces and more heartaches than I cared to remember.
Still, it was the last house Mama had found for me. I could still hear her voice echoing in the high-ceilinged marble entryway the day she’d first taken me through it. “BeBe—look at this staircase. Look at this cast-iron mantelpiece. This place will be fabulous. You will make it fabulous.” And I had, but she hadn’t lived long enough to see the house finished.
Despite all my successful real estate wheeling and dealing, as far as my grandfather was concerned, I was still just a poor, dim-witted divorcée, depending on the kindness of strangers to get along in the world.
“I’m going to the grocery store. Wanna come along?”
“Nope.”
I picked up the keys to the Lincoln from the kitchen table. “Okay if I take that pretty new car of yours to the store?”
That got me his full attention.
“It’s got a lot more horsepower than you’re used to,” he said, looking dubious.
“I’ll take it slow,” I promised.
He nodded and reached down into the pocket of the red sweatpants.
“Here,” he said, bringing out a ten-dollar bill and handing it to me.
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“For my best sugarpie,” he said, smiling. “Top off the gas tank, and buy yourself some ice cream while you’re at it.”
I planted a kiss on
his liver-spotted forehead. “Thanks, sport. I’ll be right back.”
Backing the Lincoln out of the parking spot proved to be somewhat like steering a sofa. I’d never driven such a huge car before. I drove very, very carefully over to Mitchell Motors on Victory Drive.
It was four in the afternoon, and a low, gray sky hovered overhead, denouncing the existence of spring in Savannah. The glass-walled showroom was quiet except for the drone of a huge plasma-screen television showing all the handling attributes of the latest model of Lincoln Navigator. It was a slow day for luxury American sedans, I guessed.
A pink-faced kid in a blue suit that looked a size too large sat at the raised mahogany reception desk in the front of the showroom, leafing through the March issue of Maxim magazine.
“Hi!” he said, shoving the magazine under the desk blotter and standing up. “Can I show you a new Navigator?”
“No thanks,” I said. “I actually have all the automobiles I need. My name is BeBe Loudermilk. I’ve come about my grandfather’s new Town Car.”
“Oh?” He sat back down. I noticed the nameplate on the desk. It said “Tyler Mitchell.”
“My grandfather is Spencer Loudermilk,” I continued. “Somebody here sold him a brand-new car last week. To the tune of $43,000. He apparently paid sticker price.”
Young Tyler nodded. “I remember Mr. Loudermilk. My uncle Ray sold him that car. Sweet ride, huh?”
I leaned forward on the desk. “The thing is, Tyler, my grandfather is eighty-two years old. He has glaucoma and high blood pressure. He lives in a nursing home, and rarely drives farther than the Piggly Wiggly. His 1986 Buick Electra only had 28,000 miles on it. But your uncle Ray sold him this gigantic new Lincoln. It has a moon roof and high-performance Michelin tires and satellite radio.”
“And GPS,” Tyler said helpfully. “That’s one bad ride.”
“But he’s eighty-two,” I repeated. “He lives on a fixed income.” I felt my face becoming flushed, now that we were discussing finances. “See, Tyler, senior citizens don’t need a bad ride. What they need is a low-mileage Buick that they can figure out how to start and stop. And money to pay for medicine and doctors’ bills and a nursing home. Not to mention Kit Kat bars and Scotch.”
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