The Life She Wants

Chapter Five

Emma didn’t qualify for unemployment, as hers had been a part-time job. She did qualify for food stamps, which weren’t called food stamps anymore. Although she had applied online, she had to invest four hours in the county welfare office, completed forms in hand. It was now a debit card that would come in the mail. Soon, they said—in about thirty days. If things went well. After her application was approved.

She judged herself against the great throng of people gathered in the county welfare office. She’d heard her husband rant about how many undeserving and entitled people took advantage of the welfare system, got all this free money without hardly trying. She felt like one of them and wondered if she deserved help. Probably not. She’d been married to him, after all. She also wondered where all that free money was and where those people who worked the system were. She’d always had visions of slick con men sauntering in and with the flick of a form, walking out with money or some other assistance. Most of the people in the office were women, more than half with small children hanging on their legs or sitting on their laps. At least half were Hispanic but as she’d read in the guidelines, they had to be documented to qualify. None looked like the type she expected. And no one looked at ease or comfortable about being there. As for Emma, she felt a little ill. Demoralized and ashamed, like further proof she’d done something wrong. But she looked better than anyone in the place. She still had some good clothes, expensive shoes and a couple of nice handbags, unlike everyone else there.

Her clothes didn’t fit so well these days. It hadn’t taken long for the extra pounds she’d gained from Burger Hell to fall off. Job searching, the stress of it and the sheer calisthenics of tromping all over hell and gone ate up a lot of calories. Not to mention the worry that she’d never be able to support herself again.

There seemed to be a lot of hair in her hairbrush these days. Was she losing her hair? She’d been grinding her teeth at night for a couple of years and she dreamed about losing her teeth. Awake, she worried about falling apart one batch of cells at a time.

She wondered what Rosemary, Anna and Lauren thought she was doing right now. How did they not have the slightest concern that she might be struggling? None of them reached out or asked her how she was getting by. When she’d been comfortable, before Richard’s investigation began, they were always front and center, her family. They’d wrangled first class trips to New York on Richard’s dime and just to save himself the annoyance of having them about, he’d put them up in a suite at the Plaza Athenee. It quickly became expected. Rosemary, the woman who couldn’t even have been bothered to take her shopping when she was a girl, called and in her sweetest voice would say, “It’s time for our annual trip to the city, dear. Will you book it for us?” And Emma had given them such generous, beautiful birthday and holiday gifts. They never even thanked her. They thought it was nothing to her. They probably thought one of her servants bought and shipped them.

The only jobs she seemed to qualify for were laborer’s positions. Waitressing paid far less than minimum wage because of the tips, which waitstaff were obligated to report to the IRS. In the end she did better for herself by not mentioning her degree; she said she was educated through high school. Stealing a little bit from Riley, she said she’d cleaned houses for work and the only reference she had was Adam Kerrigan because she hadn’t lived around here since high school.

So she took a job on the housekeeping staff of a hospital in Petaluma. After four days of training she began on the day shift, punching in at 7:00 a.m.

She made a decision, an easy one. She wasn’t about to tell anyone her story. She’d like to at least pay her bills for a while. She kept it simple. She had been married to a man named Rick—no one had ever called Richard Rick—they didn’t have children, he died of a brain injury. Hospital people took that to mean stroke or aneurysm, not a bullet. She never mentioned New York; she said they’d lived in Ohio. On the line that asked for her last address, she made up a completely fictitious address in Akron. She decided to come back to California where she grew up, where she had a few friends and some sparse family. It was a little dicey when people asked, in a friendly way, “Who are your friends? Who do you hang around with?” At which point Emma began to have secret, imaginary friends. “Oh, my girlfriend Mary Ann who I went to school with and a cousin, Jennifer, who’s married with two kids. Then there’s Ruth, my favorite aunt who’s only four years older—I’m close to them.”

The women on the housekeeping staff she worked with were exceptionally friendly, reaching out to her, warning her about the supervisor who was a dragon lady named Glynnis Carlson. Glynnis was short, wore a forty-year-old hairstyle with one silver slash in front, came upon them like an unexpected storm and without even raising her voice threatened their very lives for having a cell phone out, for disposing of soiled linens wrong, for leaving streaks on the floor or porcelain, letting their carts get overladen or worse, understocked. And that was nothing compared to the way she berated people who weren’t keeping up with their assigned area, which was very hard because nurses and aides were constantly summoning housekeeping. They didn’t help with cleaning up beds or patients, of course, but anything that hit the floor was passed on to the housekeeping staff. There were a lot of messes that hospital staff didn’t handle. The horrid ones.

“Be glad you’re not in the ER or the operating room. Wear a mask and never work without gloves, just change them out,” advised Barbara, one of the cleaning staff who had been around for years. “Wrap as much mess as possible in the linens, careful not to get any plastics or papers in them, get them down the chute fast as you can. Let it be laundry’s problem. They transfer it all with big sticks and hooks.”

There was a lot of that in a hospital. The doctors passed it off to the nurses, who passed it to the orderlies and aides, who passed it to housekeeping, who passed it to laundry.

It was hard, ugly work, but steady and among decent people. Emma had never been shy of hard work and she was growing confident and a little bit happy. She had work. She had just enough money and didn’t require much to live on. Life in her tiny bungalow was compact and uncomplicated. Not only were her coworkers nice to her but the patients and their visitors were also pleasant, and under the direst of circumstances—illness. Cleaners weren’t allowed to have traffic with patients—they weren’t trained for that. But there was nothing preventing them from being cordial, going for an extra water jug for flowers, calling nurses when they saw a problem. “Just don’t touch them,” the dragon lady said. “Not even if one of them falls. Switch on the emergency light and stand by.”

“Not even if they fall?” Emma asked, aghast.

“All you need is to help someone off the floor and break their neck or something. You’ll lose your job and the hospital will get sued. You never move an accident victim. You let the professionals do that.”

“Makes sense, when you put it that way,” she said.

“Think of them all as accident victims,” Glynnis said. “Just get their bathrooms clean.”

But despite these terrifying warnings, Emma warmed to the patients, particularly the elderly. Little old people were so vulnerable when ill and she found she couldn’t turn away. The old women loved her and the old men loved her more, and she just couldn’t stop herself from offering the occasional sip of water to someone who was struggling with the tray table or a glass. It pleased her to hand a wet washcloth to someone who needed it. She even stayed late and read to an eighty-five-year-old blind woman, though she was careful to ask the dragon lady for permission first.

“I’m not allowed to help you to the lavatory,” she told the woman. “I’m so sorry. But I’ll get the nurse.”

“I hate the nurse. I’d rather it be you.”

“Oh, I’d be happy to, but the housekeeping staff has been threatened with dire consequences if we break the rules, even just slightly. I’m not trained in patient care. Let me get that nurse and I’ll stay with you until she comes.”

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