It's Never too Late

The sound came from the back of the duplex, in the kitchen area. She couldn’t just ignore it. Not if Mark wasn’t there. Nonnie was elderly. Sick. And in a wheelchair.

Slipping out the sliding glass door off her kitchen, she knocked on the one next to it. And then, with her hands to the glass, she peered in.

She saw the wheelchair first. An electronically powered one coming straight toward the door. And then she caught a glimpse of the tiniest elderly woman she’d ever seen, sitting upright in the chair that engulfed her, her gnarled knuckles covering what must be the chair’s control.

Upon reaching the door, the woman reached up, hooked her hand around the latch, and with a couple of clicks the door slid open.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but are you okay?” Addy asked, taking in her neighbor’s sharp-eyed gaze with a sharp breath. If she blinked, and focused only on that expression, she could almost be looking at Gran—the only family she’d known from the time she was six.

“Fine, and frustrated and how do you do?” Nonnie said all in one breath, her voice soft, but clearly discernible. “My grandson tells me your name is Adele and I would have been over to greet you myself, but the trip out here zapped me for bit. I’m better today.”

Addy smiled. She couldn’t help herself. How a woman as frail and shrunken as this could, at the same time, be such a bundle of strength and energy she didn’t know. “The casserole was wonderful,” she said now. “I hope Mark conveyed my thanks.”

“He did. Which gave me the chance to tell him, ‘I told you so.’” The bony chin jutted upward.

Laughing, Addy remembered why she’d knocked on the older woman’s door. “I heard a tapping sound....”

“This darn thing,” Nonnie held up a metal rod with a plastic handle on one end and a claw-looking thing on the other. “I’m trying to get a package of beans off the top shelf over there and I cannot get this thing to close around it. Reminds me of a game they brought into the bar. You pushed buttons to drop a claw and it was supposed to grab a stuffed toy. Of course it never did.”

The bar? This woman hung out in a bar?

“Can I get the beans for you?”

“I’d rather you show me how to work this thing,” Nonnie said instead. “I’ve used it to reach for things at counter level, but up high, I’m not doing something right.”

Following the chair until it stopped beneath the highest pantry shelf, Addy took the grabber, played with it a minute and saw the problem. The older woman was clutching it just fine. She just didn’t have the claw around the beans.

Obviously the woman’s eyesight wasn’t all that good, either.

Helping the claw connect to its prey, Addy watched as Nonnie brought the beans down and dropped them in her lap.

“I’m making soup,” the woman proclaimed, and wheeled herself over to the stove where she bent, opened the bottom drawer and pulled out a Crock-Pot that she also put in the chair with her.

“I can get that.” Addy reached for the pot. And had her hand lightly swatted for her effort.

“I know you can get it,” the woman said. “But the important thing here is that so can I. And I intend to get this soup on before that stubborn and pigheaded grandson of mine gets home. He thinks he’s helping when he does things for me, but I swear, that boy’s going to have me in an early grave if he doesn’t let me do things with my day. I can’t just stare at the computer screen all day long.”

The whole time she was talking, Nonnie was using a combination of claw, hands and chair to turn on the faucet, measure water into a pitcher, pour it in the Crock-Pot, add beans and a Baggie of freshly chopped onions and plug it into a waist-high outlet by the stove. She pulled out a drawer—one that held dish towels in Addy’s half of the duplex—grabbed some spices and sprinkled them atop her mix.

Entranced, and afraid of offending the dynamo a second time, Addy stood frozen and watched.

“Sometimes Mark forgets that his old granny is a tough woman,” Nonnie was saying. “Couldn’t have tended bar all those years to pay for his keep if I’d been a swooner.”

Nonnie was a bartender? Eyeing the tiny woman in the flowered cotton dress, Addy couldn’t make the two images meld into one woman.

“I’m guessing he just loves you and wants what’s best for you,” she said when it appeared that it was her turn to speak. She should go. If she studied reports from then until Monday when classes started, she still wasn’t going to be halfway through this first batch of information. Once classes started, not only would her research double, she’d also have homework assignments to complete if she wanted to maintain her cover. And a campus to investigate for any possible civil suit infractions.

Just how she was going to do that, beyond attending class and keeping her ear to the ground, she wasn’t yet sure. But she knew the answers would come to her. They always did. She’d see or hear something that raised a question and off she’d be, following some lead or another.

Most of them would lead her straight to dead ends, too.

In this case, she hoped all of them did.

“Be nice if he had a clue what was best for me,” the older woman was grousing, mostly to herself, as she worked. Then she added, “Mark’s a good boy. And he’s on the right track now. That’s all that matters.”

With the lid on the Crock-Pot, Nonnie wheeled herself backward and around and headed toward the living room where the television was on, the volume down low.

“I hope you can’t hear that thing over at your place,” she said, as though expecting that Addy would have followed her in.