2026 Memory Contest Fiction Runner-Up
Three weeks after my mother’s death, Scripps Hospital sent a form asking how satisfied she was with her care and a reminder about her upcoming appointment. I left it in my junk drawer. My priorities were listing her house, paying off her various debts, and publishing her memorial in the San Diego Chronicle. After subsisting on gluten-free pasta and old jars of tomato sauce, I began calling places that were hiring.
Only one of them called back. A home-health agency confirmed my vague credentials and texted me an address. The next morning, I found myself driving down a cactus-lined road near the Pala Reservation border, where the casino’s façade stood bright in the morning sun. Up a private driveway between birds-of-paradise palms, I pulled in and parked outside a casita. Vincent, my soon-to-be employer, was middle-aged and pleasant-faced. He was holding a phone to his ear and speaking rapidly in Spanish.
I followed him inside, where an elderly gentleman, whom I assumed would be my charge, sat in a recliner. The chair faced the TV, and the man didn’t look at me or acknowledge our presence.
“This is my dad, Harold,” Vincent said, snapping his phone into a holster around his waist. “I’d stay with Dad myself, but I’ve got plumbing work, sometimes twelve-hour days. And Dad wanders.” Vincent pointed toward the Casino. “He used to work the fields before it got built. Sometimes he still wanders down the road, like he’s late for his shift.”
I tried to imagine a field in place of the Casino.
“Last time we found him in the desert, second-degree sunburn, bitten by a snake, dehydrated. He spent over a month in the hospital. Helpers we’ve had,” he waved his hand dismissively, “useless. Last girl stared at her phone all day. I told IHSS we need steady, reliable. If you can’t be here five days a week, alert, solid, then this ain’t for you.” He grabbed the remote and turned down the TV’s volume. “So what do you think?”
“Sounds good,” I said. Caregiving had become my unbidden specialty. I told him I had plenty of experience with wandering dementia patients, but I might have said anything. My mortgage was due, and I’d stopped opening the envelopes piling up in my kitchen.
“Good. I’ve installed a door alarm,” Vincent said, pointing at the device on the wall. “If it goes off, I’m notified, but he usually sleeps late, so you’ll need to be here by nine, before he’s up. He used to wear a tracker, but he lost every single one of them. You’ll have to keep an eye on the window, too. When he’s feeling agile, who knows. I live only ten minutes away. Which means I’ll be showing up whenever I can to check on things.”
“Got it.”
“You can handle this, right?”
We agreed I’d start the next morning.
It didn’t take long to realize that Harold preferred his television to most other activities. He watched pool tournaments in the mornings and then boxing matches in the afternoons. The flat-screen TV boasted more than 500 channels and was mounted high above the recliner that cradled him while he slept. The sounds of televised sports became our white noise.
His chair hid a tray that could be extended across his lap. While he ate the lunch I prepared, I took the opportunity to study the jagged scar running down the back of his head and tried to imagine its origin. It looked as if his head had been carved open by a wild animal and then poorly stitched back together. As instructed, I gave him his medications and reminded him to shower and brush his teeth.
That first evening, I left a stripe-pajamaed Harold kneeling beside his bed with his hands clasped around rosary beads, murmuring in front of a small Mother Mary shrine. “Holy, holy, holy,” he repeated.
The next day, I assumed tasks of my own accord. I brought him food from home, the lentil stew I used to make for my mother (a recipe she deemed inedible). I brought my old iron and board from home and pressed his shirts. I swept the floor and sprayed bleach between the tiles to brighten. The work was merely a continuation of the care I gave to my mother. Before that, my job as a librarian had dwindled to dusting computers and straightening vacant shelves until my boss, Christina, pulled me aside.
“It’s the machines,” she said. “All our jobs, poof.”
The savings I’d made as a librarian carried me through the years of looking after Mom. It started with her first stroke, one evening, when she stopped speaking mid-sentence and stared at her hand, her mouth open. She had once been the obsession of young men, a woman who studied fashion magazines and laughed often over life’s absurdities. Being cared for embittered her, then turned her inward. She became, without much protest, a woman who showered in a medical chair, wore bathrobes and slippers all day, and moved about with a walker, until eventually she couldn’t.
It was hard to reconcile this woman with the one I’d remembered standing on the sidewalk one spring afternoon, laughing with a man from down the street, a glass of iced tea sweating in her hand. The brick house with crumbling mortar behind her, and the child inside it—none of it seemed to belong to her.
For years, my mother endured indignities usually reserved for infants, but love has a cruel language all its own. In her shower chair one evening, her elbows rested on her knees as I washed her. She pushed my hand away. “Enough,” she said, but she allowed me to finish.
Harold’s primary humiliation was that he had no teeth.
“I want a piece of meat!” he yelled on my third day.
I felt a bristling irritation, followed by shame.
“I want steak and grilled chicken. What good is this?” he said, holding the tuna sandwich I prepared. “I’m a prisoner!”
But he ate it anyway. Vincent had warned me to give him only soup, oatmeal, canned tuna, or salmon. He’d told me that once, in the VA hospital, Harold had gotten a piece of chicken stuck in his throat. “If I hadn’t been there, he would have died,” he said.
Vincent’s “Do Not” list hung on the wall:
- NO caffeine or salt
- NO stairs
- NO leaving him unattended
- NO nuts, hard, chewy foods
- NO strenuous exercise
Harold vehemently objected to “no salt.” He swore in Spanish, demanding “Salsa, salsa!” I sometimes wondered whether the work of caregiving was not preventing death (which I, despite my vigilance and sleepless nights, couldn’t do) but managing the small erosions of choice and dignity that come before it.
Although I followed Harold’s strict regimen, I still lay those first nights in my own bed cataloguing—just as I had cataloged Stephen King’s horror novels—the ways Harold might die on my watch. Each imagined failure became a problem I would face were I not vigilant in the extreme. I even rehearsed what I’d say in the event of my failure, not only to Vincent, but to the paramedics, to my IHSS employer. Sleep did not arrive until my body grew too weary to follow the thoughts.
I spent a lot of time trying to determine what Harold might want, whether he was in pain, or hungry, whether he wanted the window open or closed, the air conditioner on or off. If I stepped into the bathroom to relieve myself, I worried he would open the window and silently wander off. God forbid he wandered past the casino. Out there, the roads became brush country: prickly chaparral, low twisted oaks, the possibility of wild animals, not to mention heat. I began to keep the bathroom door slightly ajar.
In my second week as Harold’s caregiver, I arrived on a rainy morning to find him in his chair with blood dried along his chin and soaking his white T-shirt.
“Bleeding,” he said, holding up his red hands.
A ribbon of blood led from Harold to the bathroom.
“Where’s it coming from?”
I held his hands, flipping them over and inspecting them. I tipped his head up thinking he’d split his chin. I checked his ears.
“Where’s it coming from, Harold?”
The wastebasket was filled with crimson tissues. I was familiar with moments like this, but I stood staring at the blank wall, my ears ringing. I thought I should call Vincent first, but I decided to follow IHSS protocol: If the client is at risk, you must act immediately. I phoned for an ambulance. For fifteen minutes, I attempted to clean the blood off Harold’s hands and face before two broad-shouldered men arrived and lifted him gently from his chair. They spoke to him in tones I used for children at the library’s reference desk.
That evening, Vincent called me.
“You know how much that ambulance is gonna cost me?” he said. “The VA won’t pay for it. It was just a nosebleed! You should have called me first!”
My mother, too, could snap at times about the chair scooting when she sat in it, or if I tied a double knot in her shoes instead of one. Especially if I reminded her to drink water more than once a day, her nose would wrinkle, and she’d say, “If you’re going to be a piss ass, just keep your mouth shut.” There were days like that when I understood why caregivers left. The words were so unlike her personality in her younger years, but I grew used to it. Vince’s tone didn’t trouble me, but the fear of losing my position did.
That night, I stepped outside my house, lit a cigarette, though I hadn’t smoked in over thirty years. There was no one to check on, no reason to go back inside. In my San Diego neighborhood, daytime brings the noise of traffic, police helicopters, lawnmowers, but at night, a windless calm takes over. Under the bright moon, my rock garden appeared strangely staged, like props arranged to look real. The red blinking lights of planes overhead and the moon’s light seemed set in place. I stood there letting the cigarette burn between my fingers, not sure what to make of it.
The next day, I brought a spiral notebook to Harold’s casita and created charts for his medications. I brought my mother’s old blood pressure cuff and took Harold’s blood pressure twice a day, jotting the results each time. There were pills to swallow, grooming to be done, and anti-itch lotions to apply. His body became a schedule.
In response, Harold began walking toward the door whenever I turned my back, sending the alarm into a frenzy. So I accompanied him down to the end of the driveway and back, which left him even more eager to don his shoes and head out. Each time, he complained of dizziness, so I took his blood pressure: always around 90/60, too low.
To keep his attention off his freedom, I distracted him with small talk.
For the most part, he was an adept listener. He misplaced the details of his own life so readily but seemed to recognize the rhythm of conversation. “Is that right?” he would interject as I spoke. Or, “You don’t say.” Or, “Well, I’ll be.” I could even make him laugh on occasion, especially when I stood to gesture while I told a story.
I began telling Harold how I kept the lights and television off during peak hours to save on electricity. How I shut off the water while shampooing my hair. How I waited until the last possible moment to pay for my car’s registration. He nodded at most of our exchanges, but once, when I asked about his children, he cried bitterly.
Though I’d learned not to ask too many questions (my mother often snarled when I did), I asked him about his past. He told me he served in the Korean War. With wet eyes, he said, “You’d think I didn’t earn my place just ‘cause I’m Harold Garcia.” He pulled out something from his nightstand drawer. “But I got this.” It was a bronze, round medallion depicting a soldier and inscribed with his Korean service. Though small, it felt heavy, as if it compressed years into something easy to misplace.
“Now, I have no tequila, no smokes, just a room and groceries. And a TV.”
I put the medal in my purse before he could misplace it. I suppose I felt obligated to keep it safe. I would return it, I assured myself. It was the first time I thought about how many Harold Garcias must exist in the world with medals tucked into drawers, while they lived in rented studios behind someone else’s house.
He sipped the hot cocoa I made for him and told me details about his time during the Korean War. He’d served in the Navy as a cook, though whether he set foot on Korean soil or held a gun in combat, I didn’t know. He mentioned his “Muy bonita esposa,” Estelle, waiting for him back home. I pictured him in his uniform, stepping off a Navy ship in San Diego, his wife waiting for him on the dock, their kiss like the V-J Day in Times Square photo. After the war, he worked in the fields picking oranges, avocados, and lemons for many years. He loved to drink tequila, all kinds, and this made Estelle throw objects at him, and eventually toss him out.
He lived in Tijuana after that, enjoying the fiestas at the barras on the colorful, weathered main streets. He converted his sister’s garage into an apartment that became his home. In that crowded family house with Harold’s parents and his sister’s husband and their children, they had tamale-making parties with massive pots steaming over open fires. They celebrated birthdays and Christmases with birria, frijoles refritos, and horchata. He stayed there, abandoning the bills and the open mouths of nine children, leaving Estelle to raise them all, most of whom no longer spoke to him.
With the air-conditioner clicking on and off, Harold and I conversed often. I spoke freely because I knew he would not remember. I told him about the few interesting and not-so-interesting men who had passed through my life in the last decades, and how little I expected from that part of my life anymore. I described instead the comfort I found in folding freshly washed laundry, in locking my deadbolt behind me when I left my small two-bedroom house, and in hoping that it would all be there when I got home: my bird and butterfly curtains, my big couch in front of the flatscreen, my dark kitchen with the small skylight, the rock garden with its flowering plants and visiting hummingbirds.
I told him how I put all my mother’s clothes into vacuum-sealed bags and stacked them in boxes in my garage, towers of plastic blue. How odd it was to realize that clothes are just things we put on our bodies, and without bodies, they’re just airless space fillers. I shared with him my mother’s favorite books, The Clan of the Cave Bear series, featuring the lives of Ice Age Neandertals. I told him how I tried to read them, even wearing her reading glasses, but the stories didn’t interest me. I shared details of my stepdaughter’s emails from Sudan, Africa, about the storms that lifted dust right from the ground, the scorpion bites she got, and the children she taught whose names I could not pronounce. After days of these conversations, I began to get the sense that Harold and I were becoming friends, and the hours that we spent together accumulated into a familiarity that I began to look forward to.
I looked over one afternoon and found Harold curled into his chair like an infant, his mouth open on one side and his hands resting in his lap.
He opened his eyes and said, “You’re still here?”
“I am, but you can’t nap yet. It’s time for your shower.”
Harold, unfortunately, liked to come out of the shower naked, point at himself and say, “I can still put this in your box.” I tried not to respond to his candor, but it brought back moments of another time in my life: my marriage and the brief dalliances I chose not to remember. The tight clothing and heels. The man I met at a librarian conference in Toledo but lost his number. And the man I might have had, years ago, but caregiving took priority. For a long time, I remembered things about him I had no use for. So Harold’s friskiness felt like traces of those past charms.
While sweeping Harold’s room one afternoon, I looked up and found the window by his bed open and Harold already halfway down the gravel driveway, the wind blowing up long strands of his gray hair.
When I caught up with him, he said, “I’m picking up my paycheck and going to TJ. I don’t like it here.”
“The ranch was replaced by the casino over twenty years ago,” I said.
“I don’t know you. You’re not my daughter. Leave me alone!”
Vincent, of course, found out, and after I explained and apologized, he said, very quietly, “This can never happen again. Do you get me?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Unacceptable.”
That night I stood in the grocery store’s liquor aisle in front of the Camarena Silver tequila Harold liked. I bought it and kept it in my purse for several days, along with the medal. I warred inside my mind. Then one afternoon, I took it out, along with a small shot glass. It was hardly more than a few gulps. But he sipped it, like he’d forgotten how to drink, his hands shaking less than usual. He turned red-faced and smiled, exposing gums. Fine, I thought, as long as the hour still passed uneventfully.
At precisely 4:30 each day, I began listening for the sounds of wheels on the gravel driveway as I sloshed tequila into the shot glass.
Shortly thereafter came the cigarettes, the strong-filtered kind. When the distant ocean breezes hit Pala, I brought Harold out behind the casita. Jerusalem crickets and ants emerged from their burrows as I lit his cigarettes. Together, we watched the smoke swirl out of his mouth. It wasn’t difficult to hide the smells from Vincent: I fed Harold dinner and had him shower. I could only hope he wouldn’t confess our misdeeds. I didn’t think too hard about it.
One afternoon, in my fifth month on the job, while Harold slept, I collected the trash bins into a plastic bag. I turned off the door alarm and quietly stepped out to the dumpster. Though Vincent had said not to leave his father alone, my mother used to say, “Don’t make your whole life about me.”
When I returned to Harold’s room, I placed new bags in the trash cans. From the refrigerator, I took out sandwich meat, bread, a tomato, and lettuce. As I had thousands of times before, I sliced and layered the ingredients, spread mustard on the bread, and placed the sandwich on a plate.
I turned to serve Harold his lunch, but he was putting on his jacket.
I asked him where he was going.
“Out.”
According to the In-Home Support Services manual, if a client leaves the premises, you must report it immediately. But I watched him walk out the door and down the driveway with more purpose than he ever showed on the way to the shower. Anyone seeing him from a distance would have taken him for a retired gentleman out for an afternoon stroll, intent on a little sun and the simple act of moving under his own will.
The casino’s glassy windows rose up beside him, reflecting the four-floor parking garage and Harold among the green hilly landscape and avocado farms.
I should have stopped him, but I let Harold walk far ahead until I lost him.
Then, I crossed the street past the gas station and entered the casino through the arched double doors. Inside, I stopped to let my eyes adjust. Lights flickered red, gold, green, blue. The whole place chimed without pause. Electronic slot machines erupted in constant applause. People wandered from machine to machine, some in electric wheelchairs or medical scooters. One grey-faced woman dragged her oxygen tank behind her as she sat down on a stool, the bones of her spine visible through her sweater. I made my way past rows of machines, my eyes searching for Harold’s tall frame and thin gray hair.
I passed the card tables with serious-faced gamblers gathering decks and piles of chips, dealers standing at attention in black-and-white attire.
A commotion behind me made me look back, expecting Harold to be on the floor, a crowd around him. Instead, a woman was laughing and hugging a man in front of a blinking slot machine.
I navigated the entire casino, around sticky carpet stains and slot stools, before I spotted a security guard. “Have you seen an elderly gentleman wearing a red shirt and grey pants?”
He pointed me toward the security desk. “They can make an announcement.”
I made a wider sweep past the private gambling rooms all the way to the nearly empty nickel slots at the back of the casino. In my head was my mother’s voice from that afternoon I kept her waiting: I could’ve died of hunger.
He sat on a stool, pulling the handle on an unresponsive screen.
“Harold,” I said, my hand on my chest.
He looked up at me. “Who are you?”
I sat down next to him.
“Estelle,” he said, “why don’t you play a game with me?”
I considered our options. “I think you need money for that.” I took the fifteen dollars I had in my pocket and exchanged it for coins in the machine. A waitress brought Harold a free soda, and a band struck up reggae music at the bar. Around us, the beeps and lights of the casino were not so different from those in a hospital room; that same artificial brightness in the daytime meant to keep people alert, upright, participating. People sat in rows, feeding coins into machines, waiting for wins. At home, I had arranged Harold’s pills in their compartments and noted his numbers in my spiral notebook. There was comfort in repetition, in doing the thing in front of you and hoping for a payout.
With our coins fed to the slots, Harold held his winning five-dollar ticket, and I shrugged, “The house has the edge.”
With my head full of visions of Vincent wearing his worry like a pipe about to burst, I reached for Harold’s elbow, papery skin beneath a pointy bone. It was a familiar gesture.
“Time for tequila and a smoke.”
Harold rose from his stool but wobbled. I let him lean against me as we strolled past the table gamblers and the roulette players, past bouncing and shimmering screens, past the waitress in a short skirt over fishnet stockings, and out into the bright sunlight of the reservation. We reached the corner, the long walk across the intersection with its flashing hand beeping at us. “Just a little further.” I patted his back. “Just about a hundred more steps.”
From the driveway, I spotted Vincent’s truck. He was outside, his cell phone against his ear, pacing in the sun. Glistening sweat threaded across his face.
“You lost him, didn’t you?” he demanded as we came slowly up the driveway. I prayed that Harold would forget the last hour.
When I got Harold inside, into his chair, I offered him a bottle of cold water.
“He’s fine,” I said. “You worry too much.” All those years I’d practiced arranging days around the goal of health, believing that if I could put in the hours, cook the food, administer meds, spend the sleepless nights emptying bedpans, dotting my medical I’s, nothing truly bad could happen.
“Where were you!”
“We took a walk,” I said. Harold kicked off his shoes and I noticed the blister on his heel, the flush on his cheeks. ”It’s fine.”
After that day, I began to let Harold take walks on his own while Vincent was sure to be working. He wandered about once a week beyond the reach of charts and reminders, sometimes just down to the end of the driveway. Other times farther. I gave him a five-minute head start. I didn’t rush after him, but let him get far enough out of sight that my shoulders relaxed. Usually, I found him in the casino sitting at a slot machine. I knew if I lost my job there would always be another Harold somewhere, another chair facing a television, another opportunity to hold the day together with lists and routines.
One evening after Vincent left, I stayed later than I was required to. We sat in front of the television, Harold sipping tequila. Outside, the casino lit up like dusty fireworks, and faint music from the Friday night Motown band thrummed through the stucco walls.
“We should go check out a band one of these Friday nights,” I said.
He nodded, a gummy smile, and asked, “Who are you?”