Red

The long-nosed nurse stationed at the front desk says hello and calls you Karen, which isn’t your name. Her tongue flicks the edge of her index finger before she turns the page of a glossy magazine. “These twelve-hour shifts kill me,” she says as you walk by.

You take long strides past double-parked wheelchairs occupied by shrunken men and women who yell to you for help. You whisper you don’t know how, that you majored in advertising.

Your grandmother’s room is at the end of the hall. She sits by a window with a view of a green dumpster. You kiss her on the cheek. She takes your hand; her fingernails, long and smooth, are yellowed from years of smoking at bars with men who called her Red.

You come once a week with news about what’s happening to everyone. You tell her how your sister lost her job again, and that your mother is in Florida until the end of the month. But she’s not interested and asks you five times why you’ve left your husband. Five times she forgets. After the sixth time you tell her he left you.

A nurse floats in, and places a tray on the table. “Lunch is ready,” she says and ties a napkin around your grandmother’s neck. The nurse calls her “Baby” and tells her that Bernie’s One-Man Band starts at seven.

A woman seated in a wheelchair and carrying a plastic doll pushes herself through the doorway. “It’s dead,” the woman announces, and throws it to the floor. A nurse arrives and whisks the woman away.

You turn on the news and fall asleep as the voice from the TV warns you not to drink and drive. “Brush my hair,” your grandmother says, poking the edge of the brush into your arm. Her hair was once the color of cinnamon sticks and trailed down her back. Now it stands up straight in short tufts. When you were young, you stood behind her, counting to one hundred as you pulled the brush through her hair. You close your eyes and count out loud.

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