The Night My Nurse Never Came, I Woke Up to a Note on the Wall That None of My Children Wrote

The night after my heart surgery, I lay in a hospital bed in Des Moines with wires everywhere, crying for a nurse who never came, and by sunrise someone had taped a note to my wall that not one person in my family had written.

I’m 66 years old and I’ve been stubborn my whole life, so it took a heart valve that barely opened and two fainting spells in the feed store parking lot before I finally let Dr. Halvorsen cut me open. My late husband Dale used to say I’d argue with a fence post if it leaned the wrong way. He’s been gone four years this November, and I still set out two coffee cups some mornings before I catch myself.

My boys drove me up from Ottumwa on Tuesday. Garrett, my oldest, took off work at the co-op. Beau, my youngest, sat in that waiting room the whole six hours. He’s 38, never married, and lives out on the old home place looking after my beagle Biscuit while I’m laid up. Every Sunday I ask him when he’s going to find a nice girl, and every Sunday he just grins and passes me the mashed potatoes.

The surgery went fine. It was the night after that went sideways.

My pain medicine was due at 9:40. I know because I watched that big round clock on the wall the way you watch a pot that won’t boil. My day nurse, a sweet older gal named Patrice, went home at seven. The new one came in once, checked my IV, barely looked at me, and said, “I’ll be right back with your meds, Mrs. Pruitt.” Her voice was shaky, like she was coming down with something.

9:40 came and went. Then 10:15. Then 10:50. I pushed that call button so many times my thumb hurt worse than my chest. By the time a different nurse showed up after eleven, I was crying and not one bit ashamed of it. I told her I was raised never to make a fuss in public, and I was about to make the biggest fuss that floor had ever seen. She apologized, said there’d been “a staffing change,” gave me my medicine, and I finally slept.

When I woke up around six, there were things in my room that hadn’t been there before.

A little piece of paper was taped to the wall by the door. In neat handwriting it said, “Get well soon, Mom! We love you!” with a lopsided heart colored in red crayon.

On the windowsill sat a jar of peach roses, the same kind I grow along my front porch.

And on the tray table next to the computer keyboard was a wooden picture frame, turned just so I could see it from the bed.

Now, my boys love me. But Garrett signs birthday cards “G.” and Beau hasn’t written anything longer than a grocery list since high school. Neither one of them colors hearts. And neither one had been there that night, because I’d sent them both to the motel at eight.

I couldn’t reach the frame without tugging on my lines, so I just squinted at it. A family picture, taken outside on a fall day, everybody bundled up and smiling. I figured someone had left it in the wrong room. Some other mama’s family.

I texted Garrett. “Did you put a note on my wall?” He wrote back, “What note? You ok Mom?” I texted Beau the same thing. He didn’t answer for almost twenty minutes, which isn’t like him. Then he wrote, “Be there at 8. Don’t get up.”

Don’t get up. Like I could have.

When the day nurse came in, I asked who’d been in my room overnight. She checked the chart and said, kind of carefully, “Your night nurse asked to be reassigned at the start of her shift, ma’am. That’s how your meds got missed in the handoff, and I’m so sorry.” Then she glanced at the note on the wall. “She must have come back by after she clocked out. Kendra’s a real good nurse.”

I didn’t know any Kendra. I told her so.

She got real quiet. Then she picked up the frame, put it in my hands, and said, “I think she wanted you to have this.”

I put my reading glasses on.

It was a family standing under a big maple tree. A young woman with a dark ponytail. Two little kids with red curls, the same Pruitt red Dale had before he went gray. An older couple off to one side, the man in a faded seed cap. And right in the middle, his arm around that dark-haired woman, a red-headed little girl on his hip, was my son Beau.

My Beau. Who “never had time for dating.” Who passed me the potatoes every Sunday and grinned.

And the older man in the seed cap, I knew that face too. I’d seen it on the front page of the Ottumwa Courier four years ago, outside the courthouse. Roy Lusk. The man who was driving the grain truck that hit my husband’s pickup on County Road 12.

Beau walked in at 7:52 with two coffees and his ball cap in his hands, like he was twelve and had just broken a window. He saw the frame in my lap and sank into the chair by the window.

“Her name’s Kendra,” he said. “We got married at the Wapello County courthouse three years ago. Owen’s five. Hattie turned three in August.”

I asked him how long he’d known her. He said six years.

Six. Before Dad.

That’s what broke me. Because after the funeral, standing in my kitchen with casseroles stacked to the ceiling, I’d said out loud that no Lusk would ever set foot on Pruitt land as long as I was breathing. Beau heard me. And he believed me.

“I wanted to tell you a hundred times, Mama. Every single Sunday.”

“You let me ask you about nice girls for four years,” I said. “Four years, Beau. I’ve got grandbabies I’ve never held.”

He didn’t argue. He just cried, and so did I.

Then he told me the part I’d never let anybody tell me. I never read the sheriff’s report. Garrett brought it to me, and I put it in the cedar chest without opening it. I wanted somebody to blame, and Roy Lusk was right there.

“Dad had a heart attack, Mama. Before the truck. He was already slumped over when the pickup drifted across the center line. Roy put his rig in the ditch trying to miss him. He broke his collarbone doing it. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

The door opened then, and there she was. Jeans, sweatshirt, eyes swollen. She stood right next to that note like she was ready to take it down if I told her to.

“I’m so sorry about your medicine, Mrs. Pruitt,” she said. “I saw your name on my assignment and I panicked. I asked to switch, and it got all tangled up. I sat in the break room listening to your call light and I couldn’t make myself walk in.” She swallowed. “Hattie colored the heart. She calls you Grandma Lettie. She’s only ever seen you in pictures.”

Nobody had called me Lettie since Dale.

“There’s something else,” Kendra said quietly. “I was working the ER that night. I didn’t know who he was until I saw his wallet. You were still forty minutes out on Highway 34, so I held his hand. He woke up for just a second. He said, ‘Tell Lettie the swing’s done. It’s in the barn.’”

I’d nagged that man for three summers about our broken porch swing. I hadn’t stepped foot in the barn since he died.

“Beau and I found it this spring,” she said. “It’s hanging on your porch right now. He didn’t know how to explain it, so he never did.”

I held out my hand, and she took it. It was the same hand that held my husband’s when I couldn’t. How do you stay angry at a hand like that?

Later that morning, Beau propped his phone up on the tray table so I could FaceTime the kids. Owen showed me a loose tooth. Hattie asked if my heart was fixed. I made a heart with my fingers, tubes and all, and she squealed and made one right back.

I went home Friday. The swing was on the porch, painted barn red, exactly how I always wanted it.

This Sunday I’m making a pot roast, and I’m setting the table for nine. Roy Lusk is sitting at the head of it, in Dale’s chair, because I owe that man four years of an apology, and I’d like to start paying it back with mashed potatoes.

This story is a work of fiction written for entertainment. Names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination, and the photo is used for illustrative purposes only.