Chapter 11: One Pitcher a Day

One Pitcher a Day

The room went quiet.

Her mother’s hand came down off her shoulder and lay along the blanket. She didn’t say anything else about the money, and she didn’t say anything back to the woman in the second bed. She lay with her eyes on the ceiling until they shut.

Nell waited where she was until she was sure nothing else was coming. Then she went around to the empty bed under the window, folded her coat twice for a pillow, and lay down with the money pocket turned in against her.

They drew blood before it was light. The nurse turned her mother’s arm out of the blanket and found the vein on the first try and filled two tubes and wrote on the labels with the pen out of her pocket while her mother made a noise and went back under, and then pulled the door to behind her.

Her mother needed the bathroom after that, so Nell walked her down the hall a step at a time and waited outside the door.

The kitchen was at the end of that same hall — a stove, a sink, and a copper spigot on the wall that ran hot. On her way back past the room Nell got their white pitcher off the chair and carried it down. The woman working in there took it out of her hands and filled it and set it on the drainboard.

“One a day,” she said. “One pitcher. Don’t come back this afternoon wanting a second one, because there isn’t one.”

“I won’t,” Nell said.

She carried it up and set it on the nightstand between the beds where her mother could reach it, and went down to the cafeteria.

Breakfast was behind a double door off the lobby, and it smelled like coffee and wet wool, and there was a line. The girl at the counter had her hair under a net and wouldn’t take money. She shook her head at the bills and tipped her chin back at the door.

“Tickets.”

The cashier’s window was out in the lobby, past the elevators. Nell bought what she needed there and not one ticket more, and counted the change on her way back to the end of the line.

She got three rolls out of the warmer with a napkin folded around them and a cup of soup with a lid pressed down on it, and paid for all of it in tickets.

Rankin was in the waiting room in the same end chair, his hat on his knee, and he was awake.

She held the napkin out to him.

He looked at it a while before he took it. “You’re something else,” he said. “Your mother’s up there in a bed and it’s me you’re feeding.”

“You gave up a night’s work on somebody’s fence line.”

“That fence line’s been there a year and a half. It’ll keep.”

He ate one standing up by the radiator with his hat under his arm. “Bobbie and Frankie ate,” he said. “Ruth’s got them in the back room. They’re all right.”

“Thank you.”

She owed him the gas and the night’s work and the sleep he had given up in that chair, and a roll in a napkin was not going to touch it.

“You need anything out of the house, you say so and I’ll bring it in when I’m through this way.”

“All right.”

He put a second roll in his shirt pocket, folded the napkin over the last one, and put it back in her hand. “That one’s for your mother,” he said. Then he walked her as far as the bottom of the stairs and went out the front doors to the car.

Upstairs, the door of the room stood open a little. Nell pushed it with her shoulder and stopped with the soup in her hands.

The woman from the second bed was at the nightstand between the beds with a big enamel cup, and the white pitcher was tipped up over it, and the water was running in.

One pitcher a day, the woman in the kitchen had said, and there wasn’t another one coming until tomorrow morning.

If she had asked for a cup of it, Nell would have poured her one. She would have poured it without being asked, if the woman had been decent for ten minutes together since they came in.

“You looking at something?” the woman said. She didn’t stop pouring and she didn’t have the face of anybody who had been caught at anything. “Don’t they teach you to respect your elders?”

Nell set the soup down at the foot of the bed and came around it and took the cup out of the woman’s hand — it was most of a cup — and tipped it over the pitcher and let it run back. Then she held it upside down over the pitcher and waited for the last of it, and set it down empty on the woman’s side of the nightstand.

“Earn it,” she said.

The woman stamped her foot on the floor like a child who had been told no. “You’ve got a nerve on you. Do you know who I am?”

Nell looked at her and didn’t answer it. Nobody with the standing to ask that question had to take hot water off somebody else’s nightstand.

Then her mother’s hand came up off the blanket. “Nell. Nell, don’t. Just — talk to her nice.”

The door came open and the nurse walked in with a chart under her arm.

“Mrs. Hovde.” She said it flat, and went on before the woman could get her mouth open. “You’re still up here. Your daughter-in-law is in maternity. This is surgical. I can put a patient into that bed any hour of the day or night.”

“I’m going.” The woman put her shoes on and went out without a word to anybody.

Nell stayed where she was and looked at the bed the woman had been sleeping in.

“Maternity’s full,” the nurse said. “She sleeps up here at night.” She looked at the pitcher, and at the cup, and at Nell, and said nothing about any of it. “You’re new up here. Keep your money on you, and don’t leave anything sitting out where it can walk off. We get all kinds through this floor.”

“Thank you,” Nell said.

Her mother opened her mouth and shut it and turned her head on the pillow toward the wall.

They hung a bottle on a pole beside the bed and put a needle into the back of her mother’s hand and taped it down. The woman in the second bed didn’t come back. Then her mother started in on the bill again.

“What’s this costing us, Nell.”

“Drink your soup while there’s heat in it.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t know. You’ve known since the minute we walked in that door.”

Nell got up and took the cup out of her hand and set it on the table and poured her a cup of water out of the pitcher and put that in her hand instead. Her mother drank some of it and watched her over the rim of it and let it go for a while.

Then, later, with the soup gone and the room warm and her eyes mostly shut: “You tell me what we owe.”

“Nothing today.”

“You don’t have that kind of money.” She stopped and got her breath. “So whose is it?”

Nell straightened the blanket at the foot of the bed and told her to sleep.

The door came open four inches and a woman looked in.

She had a green scarf knotted over her hair. She looked at the bed, and then at Nell, and when she got to Nell she smiled an ordinary smile and said, “Wrong room,” and pulled the door shut, and her steps went away down the hall.

Nell unwrapped the roll out of the napkin and put it in her mother’s hand.