Twenty minutes later, I pulled into the visitors’ lot of the Beachwood Assisted Care Facility. Inside the bright lobby, the heavy pungent smell of Pine-Sol spiraled through the air and attacked my nostrils. But the place didn’t smell like pee or worse, which sometimes hung in the air of other nursing homes. By all recommendations, this facility was the best in Atlanta, but I always second-guessed my decision to place Vera here.
I smiled over the ledge of the front desk. A pretty young woman, twentysomething, with mustard-colored cornrows glanced up and smiled back.
“Oh, hey, Miss Littlejohn.”
“Hi, Quineisha. How’s my girl today?” I said while signing the visitors’ log.
“She had a really good day. She had a good appetite, too—ate all her breakfast.”
“That’s good to hear.”
The elevator pinged and I rode to the third floor. This level bustled with activity, starting with a couple of residents sitting in wheelchairs in the TV room watching The Golden Girls about eighty decibels too high. I smiled at them before I rounded the corner of the hallway and strolled up to a doorplate marked VERA HENDERSON. Inside, the saxophone-infused theme song from an episode of Sanford and Son blared through the room. Vera was planted deep in the brown leather Barcalounger beside her bed asleep, a Redbook magazine open and perched on top of her head like a tent. Her straw hat again. I gently removed the magazine, bent over, and kissed her on the top of her head. She smiled, eyes still closed, as if enjoying the last remnants of an amusing dream.
“Hey, sleepyhead.”
Vera slowly opened her eyes and gave a drowsy smile. “Hey, sugar.”
She didn’t recognize me. Either Quineisha lied or Vera’s good day had slipped away after her morning breakfast. “Turn off that idiot box and sit with me for a spell.”
I hit the remote control.
She fidgeted in her chair for a few seconds, struggling to lift her frail frame. “Where is that doggone thing?”
I took off my coat. “Can I get something for you, Vee?”
“My hat. I can’t find my hat. That sun beating down something awful. You seen my straw hat around here?”
“No, but I don’t think you need it right now. We’re indoors.”
“Oh.” Vera looked around quizzically and then back at me. Her eyes blinked a few times and fell to her lap.
When I was growing up, Vera was what folks called a “redbone.” Men lusted after her. Women did too. But she used to say she had “next to no time” for either. Whenever I think of Vera back in Chillicothe, I always remember her laughing. The kind of laugh that churned from a well deep inside her, before rumbling and gushing her infectious spirit onto everyone around her.
She rolled into Georgia back in 1967 on the Crescent City Line straight out of the Louisiana bayou. As she used to say, The white man blinked and I broke free. I was never completely sure what that meant, but I knew there had been some sort of trouble back in the bayou. She said she settled in Georgia instead of heading to Chicago where she had family because “they” would have looked for her up there. I never got any details about who was looking for her or why, and Vera considered it disrespectful of children to question their elders. Whatever happened, it was bad enough to make her pass on the Great Negro Migration north in favor of inferior Jim Crow facilities and a town so small it barely ranked a spot on a Rand-McNally road atlas.
Now, decades and a dozen illnesses later, the thick auburn ponytail she used to wear at the back of her head had transformed into two long gray braids that fell over her shoulders. Her soft yellow skin was now a dull copper color, ashen and clinging to thin fragile bone. But her broad, gap-toothed smile was still without rival.
She chattered on about Chillicothe as if decades hadn’t stepped between her and the small town she remembered, the days when her friends Miss Toney and Bankrobber would come by and sit on her porch, tsk-tsking over some poor soul’s untimely death. Vera’s cousin Birdie might stop by, too, with an apple pie or German chocolate cake. That old farmhouse was raucous with the sound of people laughing and “swapping lies,” as Vera used to say, and Otis Redding or Aretha Franklin drifting from the big black radio on the windowsill. I knew how much Vera missed her home, a modest house that sat on twenty-five acres of farmland that she inherited from a “gentleman friend,” as she used to call him. Even though I hated Chillicothe, sitting at Vera’s bedside listening to her stories about the place was like a balm for my anxious soul.