Carry the Light (7 page)

C
harlene rose early again on Sunday to get a head start on the day. She showered quickly, as quietly as she could, and decided blow-drying her hair would be too noisy. Instead, she towel-dried her hair and pulled it back into a traditional ponytail, the way she had worn it since opening her store.

En route to the kitchen, in what was becoming a daily ritual, she stopped in the living room, picked yesterday's newspaper up off the floor and refolded it. She stuck it into the old mahogany magazine rack Aunt Dorothy used for her paper recyclables and remembered the days when she used to pick up after her little ones. Then, like now, walkways throughout the house had to be kept clear to minimize the risk of tripping and falling.

She continued through to the dining room, stopping in front of the small breakfront to retrieve the glass loaf pan that held all her aunt's medications, with the exception of the insulin that needed to be refrigerated. In the same way she had kept all medications out of her children's reach, Charlene had stored these pills out of sight to prevent her aunt from taking an accidental overdose.

She carried the pan with her into the kitchen. Fifteen minutes later, she had her aunt's morning pills organized in a little glass dish at her place at the table, and her lunchtime and dinner dosages labeled and stored in plastic baggies. Charlene made a mental note to stop at the drugstore tomorrow to look at by-the-week pill organizers, although Aunt Dorothy had already insisted she had no need for one.

Aunt Dorothy's needs also required regular mealtimes, which meant Charlene could not eat on the run anymore. The meals had to be nutritious, well-balanced and consistent with the guidelines for her aunt's multiple medical problems. Hence, no more grabbing a handful of chocolates for herself and offering them to her aunt for dinner, too.

Surrounded by the hushed silence of early morning, broken only by the song of the birds outside, Charlene remembered how much she had enjoyed the solitude of the early morning when her children were little. As she peeled and diced vegetables for chicken stew in the Crock-Pot, she was convinced that in many ways, living with a sick, elderly person was not a whole lot different from living with a couple of toddlers.

There were great differences, though, she realized. A playpen could keep little ones from danger, but there was nothing to ensure a sick eighty-one-year-old woman would be safe if left unattended. And putting a toddler down for a nap was one thing; convincing a woman who had been independent and self-supporting for decades that she needed to rest in the middle of the day was quite another.

After living with her aunt for only two days, Charlene had learned that there was a thin line separating the need to respect an elderly adult's autonomy and the need to recognize when that adult needed to be told what to do and compelled to do it, if necessary.

To complicate matters, Aunt Dorothy had seemed to change since her stay in the hospital. Although she still had her marvelous sense of humor and still liked to flirt with men of any age, she seemed very content to have Charlene take care of her now, easily accepting dependency as she prepared to make the transition from this life to the next. Nonetheless, Charlene was determined to help her aunt make the most of what time she had left.

She placed the chicken in the Crock-Pot on top of the vegetables, added water, a dash of herbs and set the lid on top. Satisfied she had only to fix dumplings later this afternoon to complete the meal, she plugged in the Crock-Pot and turned the dial to Slow Cook.

She glanced at the red plastic clock over the stove and smiled. It was only seven-fifteen. She had plenty of time to tackle the preparations for the other two meals of the day before Ellie Waters picked her up for church at nine-thirty. By concentrating on her work, Charlene kept herself from wondering why Daniel had not called her—or if he had even missed her at all this weekend. She kept her stomach from growling with a mug of hot chocolate, without the whipped cream or chocolate shavings she had added when she had been with Ellie yesterday.

Within half an hour, she had a bowl of tuna salad with low-fat dressing and sugar-free, fat-free butterscotch pudding in the refrigerator, ready for lunch. She had just opened a package of English muffins when she heard the shuffle of her aunt's slippered footsteps. She looked up and smiled. “Good morning. You're up early today.”

Aunt Dorothy waved in response. “Smells good! Chicken stew?” she asked as she slowly made her way to her seat at the chrome table. Her red plaid flannel robe was too big, making her look small and fragile, but her color was good, her curls were brushed and tamed, her eyes twinkled a bit and she was wearing perfume again.

“With dumplings,” Charlene replied.

“My favorite!”

“Mine, too,” Charlene said, but she didn't add that it was Daniel's favorite as well. “I don't think I've ever seen those red elephant earrings before, but I like them,” she offered, changing the focus of her thoughts.

Aunt Dorothy blushed and tapped one of the dangling elephants with her fingertips. “I got these in 1965 at the World's Fair in New York.”

Charlene chuckled as she carried the box with the glucose machine and testing strips over to her aunt. “You remember that?”

“Actually, I remember a whole lot more than that,” she replied as she opened the box and started to lay out everything to test her blood sugar level. “Billy Martin, bless his soul, bought the earrings for me, and they weren't cheap, neither. They cost sixteen dollars, which was a respectable amount of money in those days. Not that I'd let a pair of earrings sway me, even ones as pretty as these.”

She stopped talking to struggle with the small container of testing strips, and eventually got one out and laid it on the table.

“Sway you how?” Charlene asked, putting a cup of instant decaffeinated coffee into the microwave. She had found the appliance in its original box in the spare bedroom, just as she'd found the Crock-Pot.

Aunt Dorothy pricked her finger, caught a drop of blood with the test strip and slid it into the machine. “Billy and I had been keeping company for a couple of months by then.” She smiled and shook her head. “Silly man. Like most of the other men I kept company with over the years, he wanted something he couldn't have and thought he could tempt me to give it to him.”

“Aunt Dorothy!” Charlene clapped her hand to her mouth, shocked that her aunt would discuss such an intimate detail so openly.

“Don't be a prude, Charlene, and don't jump to conclusions. I'm from a whole different generation than the foolish young women today who break the Commandments, sleep with men and then act surprised when they move on to another fool. God didn't create women so they could have sex outside of marriage, and a man doesn't buy the cow if he gets the milk for free,” she quipped, and paused to read the green numbers on the screen in front of her. “Write down one-eighty-seven in that book for me, will you please?”

Charlene recorded the number in the appropriate slot. Although it was a bit high, it was still within an acceptable range. “We need your weight, too,” she reminded her aunt. She reached into a bottom cabinet and pulled out the new scale she had bought at the pharmacy. She set it on the floor near her aunt's chair, hoping her weight was also stable. Because her aunt's heart was not pumping blood properly, any sudden weight gain would be a warning that fluids were accumulating in her body, which could lead to a whole host of problems, including pneumonia.

Aunt Dorothy stood up and held on to Charlene's arm as she stepped on the scale. “One hundred and one, just like yesterday. I do like having a scale that just flashes the number, especially digits so large,” she said with a grin.

Charlene helped her to sit back down before storing the scale away again. “So let me see if I have the story right. Billy Martin bought you earrings because he thought you'd sleep with him?”

Aunt Dorothy's eyes widened. “Not at all! The very first night he called asking me to go out with him, I made sure he knew I would never, ever sleep with a man who didn't put a wedding ring on my finger first. He just wanted me to break my rules. That's why he bought me the earrings and a pretty scarf and a box of German candy.”

Although Charlene felt awkward discussing dating with her aunt, she was too curious to stop now. She heard the microwave ding, retrieved the cup of coffee and set it down in front of her aunt. “What rules?”

“My keeping-company rules,” Aunt Dorothy replied, and wrapped her fingers around the steaming cup of coffee, waiting for it to cool.

“Dating rules,” Charlene confirmed.

“Exactly. I had three, and I never broke them, no matter how good-looking the man happened to be or how many presents he gave me to try to sway my mind.”

“Apparently I already know your first keeping-company rule. No sleeping together before marriage. What are the others?”

“Not sleeping together isn't my rule. It's one of God's,” her aunt countered, and lifted her hands to count off her rules. “First,” she said as she tapped the tip of one index finger against the other, “absolutely no kissing on the first date.”

Charlene nodded. Her mother had pounded that rule, among others, into her head long before she had started dating. Not that she had always obeyed it. She clearly remembered kissing Daniel on their first date, but opted not to mention that to her aunt.

“Second,” her aunt continued, “only two kisses per date. Two. Didn't matter if we went out to supper for an hour or two or if we spent the whole day together. Two was my limit.”

“Why only two?”

“The same reason some people with a sweet tooth only have two pieces of candy a day—to satisfy the longing and avoid too much temptation. Which brings me to rule number three,” her aunt replied matter-of-factly as she held up three fingers. “The third time a man asks you to break rule number one or two, he's out. Gone. It's over. Done. Kaput.”

Charlene cocked her head. “How long did Billy Martin last?”

“Till Thanksgiving that year. But I had a new beau by Christmas,” Aunt Dorothy said proudly. “I think I'll save John Hartman's story for another time, though. Are those English muffins I spied on the counter when I came in?”

“They are,” Charlene said, and stood up. “Would you like one toasted?”

“Real dark, if you don't mind. I think there's some sugar-free crab apple jelly on the door in the refrigerator, but I need to take my needle first,” she said, and started to get up.

Charlene gestured her back into her seat. “I'll get everything and toast the muffins. In the meantime, you need to take your pills.”

Aunt Dorothy glanced at the mound of pills in the antique salt dish and frowned. “Half of those pills are big enough to choke a horse. The other half are so small I will hardly be able to pick them up. You'd think somebody at those drug companies would think about that, but they're all probably under thirty and wouldn't have a clue,” she grumbled.

Charlene got a disposable hypodermic needle and an alcohol swab from the counter and laid them on the table before retrieving the bottle of insulin and the jelly from the refrigerator. Yesterday morning at this time she had been at Sweet Stuff, so this was her first chance to observe her aunt injecting insulin.

“I'm going to teach you how to do this, so watch closely,” her aunt instructed. “There's nothing to it.” She pulled the plastic cover off the needle and eased the tip into the bottle of insulin. “You just have to remember to fill the needle up to the line that's marked ten,” she said, and pulled the plunger back to fill the syringe. Once she was satisfied she had the correct dosage, she pulled out the needle and handed it to Charlene.

Mindful of Agnes Withers's warning that her aunt was not able to see well enough to ensure she had the right dosage, Charlene checked carefully. Her heart dropped. “I think there's too much insulin in the syringe. Didn't you say you had to fill it up to the ten?”

“Yes, why?”

Charlene held the syringe closer to her aunt and pointed to the ten. “You've got it filled up too high. It's at fifteen—see?”

Aunt Dorothy leaned closer and squinted, without bothering to remove her glasses. “If you say so. It's hard to see because the insulin doesn't have a good dark color. I really ought to speak to the pharmacy. Maybe somebody there could add some food coloring or something to make the insulin easier to see.”

“There's no harm done,” Charlene murmured. She inserted the tip of the needle back into the bottle and extracted the excess insulin. “There. You're all set now,” she said, and held the hypodermic needle out to her aunt.

Her aunt pulled back. “Go ahead. You do it.”

Charlene blinked hard. “Do what?”

“Give me my injection,” her aunt said, and pushed up the sleeve on her left arm.

“I—I don't know how.”

Her aunt cleaned a spot on her upper arm with the alcohol swab. “Just shove it in. You can't hurt me.”

Charlene's heart began to pound, but she took a deep breath, then gently inserted the needle and pressed firmly on the plunger.