My hospice patient’s husband of forty-four years got her to sign a $64,900 boat loan from her bed, then patted her hand in front of me and said, “That’s the last bill you’ll ever pay, Dee.” He thought I was furniture. So on Saturday I wheeled her into the dealership in her hospital band, with an envelope in her lap.
I’d been sitting with Deirdre three afternoons a week since the middle of August.
Volunteers don’t do medicine. We read the paper out loud, hold the straw, and stay in the chair so the family can go to the store.
Gilbert never went to the store.
He went to his recliner in the next room and scrolled through boats.
Pontoons. Bass boats with sparkle paint. He’d turn the phone sideways so the video filled the screen and play it with the sound all the way up.
Deirdre could hear every engine from her bed.
“He’s always wanted one,” she said to me once. “His dad had a rowboat with a hole in it.”
That was all she ever said about it.
The first week of October he came in with a stack of papers on a clipboard.
“Hospital bed rental, Dee. Insurance wants you by the yellow tabs.”
I was holding her water cup. From my chair I could see the top sheet.
It said MARINE across the top in blue letters, and under that, a finance company.
Hospital beds don’t come from marinas.
I kept my mouth shut. That’s the rule. We don’t get between a patient and her family.
She signed five times. Her hand shook on the last one and he held her wrist steady for her.
Then he tucked the clipboard under his arm, patted the back of her hand, and said it.
“That’s the last bill you’ll ever pay, Dee. Let me have one nice thing before the casseroles start.”
On the way out he looked straight past me.
I was the chair.
Deirdre waited until the screen door banged.
“Erika. What did I just sign.”
The way she said it, there was no question mark on the end.
So I told her. Co-applicant. A loan with her name under his. One hundred and eighty months.
She laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough, and I held the cup until it stopped.
“Fifteen YEARS,” she said. “He’s optimistic about me.”
“Do you want me to call somebody?”
“I want my reading glasses. Then I want you to find out how he knew.”
How he knew she was leaving him everything, she meant.
It took me one afternoon.
Her will was in the fire safe in the hall closet. The safe was unlocked, and the folder had a coffee ring on it that wasn’t there in July, when she’d shown me where it was just in case.
The house. Her teacher’s pension survivor benefit. The life insurance from the school district.
He’d done the math while she was still breathing. Then he’d gone shopping.
Her kitchen timer was shaped like a chicken, and the paint had worn off its beak.
On Thursday, while Gilbert was at the dealership picking out a trailer, a woman named Sheri Campbell came over with a laptop and a little printer.
Sheri had taught fourth grade across the hall from Deirdre for twenty-six years. At fifty she’d quit and gone to law school.
Hospice volunteers aren’t allowed to witness legal papers. I wiped the same counter for forty minutes and heard every word anyway.
Sheri’s paralegal, Fatima, and Tuan from next door signed as witnesses.
Deirdre had Sheri read one paragraph back to her twice.
Then she said, “Good. Now the other thing. The co-sign.”
Sheri said a co-applicant could still back out before delivery, if she walked in and said no to their faces.
“Walked,” Deirdre said, and looked down at her feet under the blanket.
Delivery was Saturday at ten.
At 9:15 Gilbert put on boat shoes with the price sticker still on one heel and kissed her forehead.
“Big day, Dee.”
“For somebody,” she said.
When his truck turned the corner she said, “Get my shoes. The ones with the buckle.”
“Deirdre, I can’t drive you anywhere. I’ll lose my badge.”
“Then lose it someplace interesting.”
It took twenty-five minutes to get her from the bed into my Corolla and the folded wheelchair into the trunk.
She held the envelope in both hands the whole way. Sheri’s handwriting on the front. Deirdre’s own name.
The dealership was out on Route 2 in Sandusky.
A stuffed fish hung over the finance office door, and it was missing an eye.
Gilbert sat at a desk across from a salesman named Kamil, a pen already in his hand.
Kamil saw us first. He stood up so fast his chair rolled into the wall.
“Mrs. Oswald? Your husband told us you were IN NO CONDITION to come in.”
“I’m in a condition,” Deirdre said. “Ask him which one.”
Gilbert turned around.
He set the pen down very carefully, like it might go off.
“Dee. What the HELL are you doing out of bed.”
“Taking my name back,” she said. “Off the hospital bed papers.”
Kamil looked at Gilbert. Gilbert looked at me.
“You did this,” he said. “Erika, take her home. RIGHT NOW.”
I didn’t move.
My hands were locked on the grips of that chair and I couldn’t have let go if I’d tried.
Deirdre lifted the envelope off her lap. The hospital band slid down her wrist and caught on her knuckle.
“I read your will too, Gil,” she said. “Turns out I get to write a new one.”
He reached for it.
She held it out of his reach, like a cookie you’re keeping from a dog.
Then she pulled out two pages and slid the first one across the desk to Kamil.
“That one’s yours,” she said. “Page two is for my husband. Out loud, please.”
Gilbert unfolded it.
His lips moved on the first line.
Then they stopped.
Page two
The first line said, “I, Deirdre Ann Oswald, of Sandusky, Ohio, being of sound mind.”
He got as far as “sound” and quit.
I found the brake on the wheelchair with my toe and pushed it down. I wanted her to stay exactly where she was.
“Keep going,” Deirdre said.
“Dee, this isn’t the place.”
“You picked the place. The second paragraph, Gil. You’ve got your glasses on.”
He read it the way a kid reads a book report his mother wrote.
“To my husband, Gilbert Oswald, I leave my reading glasses, so that he can read what he signs. Everything else that is mine to give goes to my niece, Cierra, as listed below.”
There was a list below. He didn’t read the list.
I already knew what was on it. The house. The district life insurance, on a beneficiary form Sheri had printed on that little printer and Deirdre had signed at the tray table. I’d heard her say “Cierra” four times while I wiped the counter.
Across the desk, Kamil was reading page one with his lips moving too.
Page one was short. Sheri had typed it Thursday and Deirdre had signed it in front of Fatima and Tuan. It said she was withdrawing as co-applicant on the purchase, that she had been told the papers were for a hospital bed rental, and that she was saying so in person before delivery.
Kamil looked up.
“Ma’am. It says here you were told these were hospital bed papers.”
“I was,” Deirdre said.
Gilbert put page two face down on the desk and laid his whole hand flat on top of it.
“Kamil, she’s on morphine. She doesn’t know what day it is.”
The fire safe
I met Deirdre at the end of July, before my first real shift, on the intake visit.
Hospice sends the coordinator out with a new volunteer so the patient can say no to your face. Our coordinator was Riya. She did the talking and I sat on the couch with my badge clipped to my collar.
Deirdre didn’t say no. She asked if I could read out loud without doing voices.
The hospital bed wasn’t there yet. It came the second week of August, from the medical supply place hospice uses, on hospice’s account. Two men carried it in and set it up by the window. Nobody signed anything. I know because I held the door.
That first day she was still in the recliner, the one Gilbert took over later. She got up on her walker and took me down the hall to the closet.
“Just in case,” she said, and opened the safe. “Gil loses things.”
She showed me the folder. The will. The deed. And an envelope with a closing statement on it, from a house in Norwalk.
“Mother’s house,” she said. “Forty thousand and change, in 2003. Gil put it in the market and the market ate it. I never could look at those statements. He handled it.”
She said it like she was telling me the weather.
Then she tapped the ceiling with the rubber foot of the walker.
“That roof I paid for teaching summer school. Four summers. Third graders who couldn’t read a clock.”
Riya asked about her pain. Deirdre said she took the long-acting dose at bedtime and a short one in the morning if she needed it.
“Afternoons are mine,” she said. “Put that in your notes.”
Riya put it in her notes.
In August, I was looking for the TV remote for her and found an envelope in the side pocket of Gilbert’s recliner. Lakeshore Community Credit Union, Port Clinton. His name only.
Their checks came from a bank in town. I’d seen her checkbook on the tray table a dozen times.
I put the envelope back where it was. Volunteers don’t go through mail.
Saturday morning she had not taken the short dose. I knew from the way she held the armrest of my Corolla on every turn, the whole way up Route 2. She didn’t say anything about it and neither did I.
At the desk, Kamil looked at her band. Then at Gilbert’s hand on the page.
“I’m going to have to call my finance manager,” he said, and picked up his phone.
Riya on a Saturday
“Don’t call anybody,” Gilbert said. “I’ll call somebody.”
He had the hospice number in his phone. It was on a magnet on their fridge too, under a picture of a niece’s dog.
He put it on speaker and set it on the desk next to the pen. It rang four times. Then Riya picked up, because Riya takes the Saturday line.
Gilbert did the talking.
“This is Gilbert Oswald. Your volunteer took my wife out of her bed this morning. She put her in a car. She’s got her in a boat dealership in Sandusky with her band still on. My wife is on morphine. She doesn’t know what she’s signing. She doesn’t know what she signed last week. And this woman is sitting here letting her embarrass herself in front of a salesman.”
“Mrs. Oswald?” Riya said. “Are you there?”
“I’m here,” Deirdre said. “I made her do it. I’d do it again.”
“Erika?”
I said what I had. “She’s clear. She skipped her morning dose. She does the Jumble every afternoon, Riya, she did it Wednesday in four minutes.”
“It’s ten-thirty in the morning,” Gilbert said. “It’s not the afternoon. You heard her yourself, she skipped her medication. She’s in pain and she’s confused and she’s in a car with a stranger.”
That was my fix, and he’d turned it around and used it on her.
Kamil sat down slowly in the chair that had rolled into the wall.
“Sir,” he said to Gilbert. “You told us she signed at bedside with a nurse present.”
“There was a nurse present.”
“There wasn’t,” I said. “There was me.”
Gilbert didn’t look at me. He looked at the phone.
“Riya. You want to tell her what happens to volunteers who drive patients?”
There was a pause on the line. I could hear a television on Riya’s end, a game.
“Erika. Did you drive her?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll need your badge on Monday,” Riya said. “I’m sorry.”
Lakeshore Community Credit Union
Gilbert hung up for her.
“There,” he said. “So that’s settled. Kamil, she’s not competent and the help’s been fired. Can we do the delivery.”
Kamil didn’t touch the pen. He pulled his keyboard toward him instead.
“Mr. Oswald, I can’t deliver over an objection. Not with her standing here. Sitting here. I have to rework it either way.”
He typed. He scrolled.
“If Mrs. Oswald comes off the application,” he said, “I can still try you on your own. Your Social Security alone won’t carry sixty-four nine. But with the savings you listed, the bank would probably go for it with twenty percent down. That’s about thirteen thousand.”
Deirdre turned her head.
“What savings,” she said.
“Kamil,” Gilbert said.
“It’s on the application, sir. The Lakeshore account.”
I thought about the envelope in the side pocket of the recliner. I kept my mouth shut, because it was not my turn yet, and because Deirdre already had her hand up.
“I’m on that application,” she said. “Am I or am I not.”
“You are, ma’am.”
“Then I’d like to see it. Turn the screen.”
Kamil looked at Gilbert for a long time. Gilbert said nothing.
Kamil turned the screen.
Deirdre leaned forward until the band slid all the way to her knuckle again. I leaned with her, behind the chair.
There it was, on a line under ASSETS, in the same blue as the clipboard.
Lakeshore Community Credit Union, Port Clinton. Savings. Gilbert R. Oswald. $41,212.
And next to it, in a little gray box: Member since 03/2003.
March 2003
Deirdre read the gray box twice. I could see her mouth move on the numbers.
“Mother died in January of ’03,” she said.
“Dee.”
“The closing was in March. I signed it at a table in Norwalk with a lawyer who had a cold.”
“That’s my money,” Gilbert said. “I put that away. A little every month. That’s interest, most of it.”
“Forty thousand and change,” Deirdre said. “You told me the market ate it.”
“The market ate some of it.”
“Which part.”
He didn’t answer that.
I’d held that envelope in July. I’d read the closing statement over her shoulder, because she’d held it up for me like it was something worth seeing.
“The check was made out to her,” I said. “It’s in the folder in the safe. Her name only.”
It was the first thing I’d said to him since the clipboard.
Gilbert turned in his chair and looked at me like the chair had talked.
“You went through our safe.”
“She showed it to me,” I said. “In July.”
Deirdre sat back. She was looking at the ceiling of the finance office, at the stained tile over Kamil’s head, and I knew which ceiling she was seeing.
“I taught summer school four years for that roof,” she said. “Third graders. You let me.”
“You wanted to work. You liked it.”
“You had forty thousand dollars in Port Clinton and you let me.”
Kamil was very still. He’d taken his hand off the mouse.
“And then you came to my bed with a clipboard,” Deirdre said. “When there was money. When there was always money.”
Gilbert pushed his glasses up into his hair.
“That money was for after,” he said.
Deirdre waited.
“After what, Gil?”
Kamil’s pen
He stood up. The chair didn’t roll, because he had a hand on it.
“After. You know after. Don’t make me say it in front of these people, Dee. You’re going to go, and I’m going to be seventy-five years old in that house by myself with the casserole dishes and your sister on the phone every night telling me what I did wrong. I sat in that next room since March listening to you cough. Every day. You think that’s free? You think I don’t get one thing that’s mine?”
“You had one thing,” Deirdre said. “For twenty-three years.”
“I was going to pay you back. In a way. The insurance would have cleared the boat and then the money’s there, for me, for whatever’s left of me. That’s not a crime. That’s planning. You’re the one always telling me to plan.”
Kamil cleared his throat.
“Mrs. Oswald. If you want to withdraw, I need it on our form. Your letter’s good, I’m keeping it, but the bank wants their form.”
He slid a sheet across the desk and set his pen on top of it, the cheap blue kind with the dealership name on the barrel.
Deirdre picked up the pen.
Her hand shook. Gilbert’s hand came out across the desk toward her wrist the way it had at the bed, out of forty-four years of habit, and she pulled her arm back into her lap.
“Don’t you touch me,” she said.
He put his hand in his pocket.
It took her almost a minute to sign. The D came out twice as big as the rest. Kamil didn’t rush her. Nobody in that room breathed loud.
“Okay,” Kamil said, and took it. “You’re off.”
Gilbert looked at the screen, and then at Kamil.
“Run it on me, then.”
“Sir, I’d need thirteen thousand down in certified funds. The credit union’s closed till Monday.”
“Then I’ll be here Monday.”
“Go ahead,” Deirdre said. “Buy it with Mother’s house.”
Gilbert stood there with his hand in his pocket. Then he said, “What happens to my deposit.”
“Twenty-five hundred,” Kamil said. “You picked the trailer Thursday and it got titled Friday. It’s not refundable after that. It’s in what you signed.”
“I didn’t read that part.”
Kamil didn’t say anything to that. He just looked at page two, face down on his desk with Gilbert’s handprint on it.
Gilbert did the math. I could see him do it, the same way he’d done it with the coffee ring.
“Cancel the whole goddamn thing,” he said.
He walked past us. Close enough that his elbow hit the push grip and the chair rocked on its locked wheel.
At the door he turned around.
“You’re nobody,” he said to me. “You were a volunteer. Monday you’re not even that.”
I kicked the brake off.
Deirdre held the envelope up in the air beside her, and I rolled her out under the fish.
The checkbook
I gave Riya my badge on Monday in the hospice parking lot. She held it a second before she put it in her pocket.
The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I went back on my own, in my own clothes, and knocked on the screen door like company.
There were three casserole dishes on the counter with masking tape on the lids. One said TUAN in marker.
Gilbert was in his recliner in the next room. The television was on with the sound low. No boats. He didn’t get up.
I sat down in the chair by the bed. Same chair.
Deirdre had me get her checkbook out of the fire safe. The folder was in there with a new rubber band around it, and no rings.
She made me hold the book open on the tray table while she wrote. My name. Fourteen dollars and sixty cents. In the memo line, in letters that went uphill, she wrote “Sandusky.”
“That’s gas,” she said. “I looked it up.”
Her hand shook on the signature. I kept both of mine flat on the tray table and didn’t touch her wrist.
She tore the check out along the perforation, slowly, and held it up to me between two fingers.
“There,” she said. “That’s my last bill.”
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who’s ever sat in the chair by a bed and kept their mouth shut.
For more family betrayals that turn deeply personal moments into public humiliations, read the story of a new mother left holding the phone and the husband who knew what his stepsister was about to say. There’s also the brothers who mocked their sister while reading their mother’s will.
