Part 3 — Two Forty One
The woman from Adult Protective Services read the name on the page aloud, and the whole post could hear her. “Mateo iPhone.” My son. She said it without any triumph, as if she wished the letters had been different. Down at the end of the table, Mateo had both hands over his face.
He came to the podium on his own two feet. I will always remember that. Nobody dragged him. “Dad, I was there,” he said. “I stopped by at two in the morning on the seventh because I needed to ask you for money. I found you on the floor at the bottom of the garage steps. Sharla was standing over you with your phone in her hand.” He swallowed hard. “She told me you were sleepwalking again, that she had called the doctor, and that if I called 911 they would take you away to a home. She canceled the call herself. And I stood there and I let her.”
I was surprised how little anger I felt. I looked at the man who was my son, forty years old and trembling at a podium in front of a roomful of Navy men, and I thought of the boy who used to climb up my leg when I came home from the mill. “You let her,” I said. “And then you came tonight.” “Elena called me,” he said. “She told me about the heart rate. I could not stand it anymore.”
My daughter Elena was standing beside the sergeant, not saying anything, with the bright stubborn jaw of her mother. She had seen the numbers first. For four months she had watched them from Denver on her phone, printed them each week, and mailed them to a father who hid them in a seabag. In September she called the county. She is the reason there was a sergeant in that hall at all.
The sergeant stepped up and explained the rest in a flat, kind voice. A sedative the doctor never ordered for me had been dissolved in the cocoa every night, from a prescription Sharla filled in her own name. A cardiologist who reviewed my records said my heart was sound for a man of seventy. It had slowed only because of the drug. Sharla had counted on everyone believing that an old man with a bad heart simply sleeps too much. A cheap watch that Sharla called tacky had been the most honest witness in the house.
He read her the charges. Financial exploitation of an at-risk elder, administering a sedative without his knowledge, theft, and interfering with an emergency call. Sharla let the plaque fall onto the carpet. The post commander picked it up. “Teddy, I took care of you,” she said, in a voice like a cracked plate. “You took care of my checkbook,” I said. It was the only mean thing I said to her, and I have not been sorry for it.
She pleaded guilty in January and was sentenced to six years in state prison. The Jeep was sold, the accounts at the casino in Cañon City were seized, and $48,000 of my $61,000 came back to me through the court. The rest will be taken from her earnings, a little at a time, for as long as it takes. The courthouse in Pueblo granted my annulment on a Tuesday, and I went out for a green chile cheeseburger and ate the whole thing.
The prosecutors decided not to charge Mateo. He went to counseling anyway, twice a week, without being told. He moved into my spare room for the winter and cooked. His green chile is not as good as mine, but he stirs it with the same wooden spoon, and he stays up with me in the evenings so I am not alone in the house.
My heart ticks like a good watch now. By Christmas I could stay awake through the whole second quarter of a Broncos game, which Elena says is the most important medical test there is. I walk two miles around the East Side every morning, past the school and the mill and the little bakery that smells like anise, and I nod at every dog.
Elena showed me the last page of the readout one evening. At 2:41 a.m. on October 7th, the watch had listened. It had recorded a faint sound before the call was canceled, a small hoarse word in my own voice. “Elena.” I do not remember saying it. I was lying in the dark on a concrete floor, and the thing I called for was my daughter. She put her head down on the kitchen table, and we sat in the quiet for a long while.
At the next meeting, the post commander stood at the same podium. “The post has voted,” he said, “to present the plaque for devoted caregiving to the person who actually earned it.” Elena protested all the way up the aisle. The Navy men stood. Somebody whistled. She took the plaque in both hands and held it against her chest, and her face went red as a chile.
I still wear the watch, under my sleeve, the same one. Some mornings I tap the face and watch the number climb. Sixty-two. Sixty-four. A steady, ordinary heartbeat, with nothing to hide. On Veterans Day we ate green chile stew at the post, and I raised a paper cup to the Kitty Hawk and to my children, and to a little gadget that kept trying to call for help.
