Margaret stood at the doorway of her room with her daughter behind her. It felt like she was a blockage for her escape rather than a supportive presence. The walls were Pepto-Bismal pink and the lineolium tile was scuffed and coming up in places. The window afforded a view of the green dumpsters behind the building near where a group of nurses now exhaled cigarette smoke and steam into the frigid winter air. On the wall a yellowed, homemade greeting card adorned with crayon read, "Get well soon, Grandma." Linda, the stocky nurse, her hair straw-colored no doubt from a cheap store-bought bleach job, ripped the card down with one chubby hand.

"Now, here we are. Isn't this nice Margaret? We'll let you decorate it the way you like, dear. And I think we even have a television in storage. Mrs. Cuffey's kids never picked it up after she...left us, so you're welcome to it, dear. Easy peasy. Would that be nice?"

It was then, right then, that Margaret realized she had made a mistake by living this long. God knew it didn't have to come to this. After Sam died, exhausted from four years of not enough oxygen, pain medicine or purpose, she could have taken her own life. If only she had loved him in the end. If only she had been a woman driven mad with grief, she might have been capable of it. Several of her friends who were widowed before her died of broken hearts within months of their husbands' deaths. She had waited for a similar fate, but sweet death didn't smell any love in her heart. Like the neglected trees in the old orchards she spent 40 years tending, the loveless were left to rot.

"Mom, would you like that? Mom?"

"What?"

"A television. Would you like Linda to bring in a television?"

"No. I just want some paper and a pen. And a nap. I need to lie down. Now."

Sarah's cell phone began ringing from in her purse. She frantically fished around for it before finally dumping its contents out on the bed her mother now sat on, hands folded in her lap, staring out the window. Linda came back in the room with a small notepad and a pen and quickly exited.

It was Roy calling. Dammit, he would be drunk. Sarah thought about not answering it. The estrangement between them had deepened around what to do with their mother. Once she died she was certain she would probably never see Roy again, and she was resigned to this, even relieved by it.

She hadn't forgiven the old woman either. But she wasn't stuck like Roy. She was unstuck. She was moving. Forward. Thousands upon thousands of dollars of therapy had allowed her to remember and then decidedly forget. Only when the migraines came, like the one she now felt filling her head with a sickening pressure, was she back there, squinting in the August heat, skin itching from peach fuzz, afraid...--JV

Henry rolled his chair – he called it his limousine – back through the sliding glass doors. He didn’t have to look down, didn’t have to navigate really, just kept his eyes on the new woman. “Make way for the limousine,” he would often call to orderlies as he wheeled into the dull linoleum and tile lobby. Today though, he was silent. There was a new game afoot, a new story to unravel.
Ignoring Linda’s hen pecking, Henry pulled up to the side of the reception desk. He rested his arm on the low counter and looked over at the new addition. Who was this woman with the sharp, high cheekbones, the delicate, long fingers, the wrinkles like river deltas radiating from the edges of her mouth, the smoldering glow in her dark eyes? She had a strange wildness about her, Henry thought. She must have been a beauty once.
Henry didn’t try to hide his gaze. He wanted her to see him looking, wanted her to notice. This was what made living here tolerable after all. Every week or two, a new one came in. They brought their histories, lifetimes of tears and joy and anger and love and loss and dreams and nightmares. Henry always wanted in.
More often than not though, the intrigue faded quickly. The new charges were riddled with Alzheimer’s or they had stopped caring or they were lost in their own static or they were just plain dull.
She was different. No way to hide it, Henry thought. Before one of the candy striper ladies led her and her daughter away for a tour of the place, she glanced over at Henry. For the briefest of moments their eyes met. There was anger in her gaze, but something else too. Fear, Henry thought. She was scared. - RJ

"Henry! Henry! Come in here! You are going to catch a death of cold!"

Fat bitch. Who do you think you're talking to? That's what he wanted to say. Linda was his least favorite nurse after all. One of these young women who talked to all the residents in a louder than necessary voice, like provincial Americans speak to non-English speaking foreigners. We're not all deaf you dumb fucking cow!

He didn't say any thing of the sort. He just pretended not to hear her, taking the last few drags of the cigarette he was't permitted to have. That's when he noticed her.

The wind blew through her white hair like a gust through a snow drift. The younger woman with her, undeniably her daughter, kept trying to hold her arm, but the woman with the wild, snowy hair kept shrugging it off. "Sarah, if I needed a damn cane, I'd buy one!"

He admired her spunk immediately, but that admiration was bittersweet in his quick realization that the staff of Pine Grove would break her. Probably quickly. Poor old gal. His welcome to new "residents," who were lucid, contained a laundry list of survival tips, which he would surely attempt to impart to this woman, whose tall build and graceful features, whose pin-straight posture and clean lines, made her instantly out of place in the home's dreary reception area. Yes, although it probably woulnd't save her, he would share what he had learned over the last five years:

1) Never ever eat the pork chop dinner
2) Only take half of any of the pills they give you
3) Take walks when ever you find an unlocked door
4) Never play chess with Bill
5) Never sass Ms. Beth
6) 3 AM is the best time to sneak out
7) Make a copy of any keys you can lay your hands on during the weekly Wal-Mart trip
8) Don't watch television
9) Avoid Dr. Stevenson
10) Don't tell anyone they hit you.

Right now though, it all seemed distant. Pine Grove, the past might as well be tiny stars flickering in the slate sky overhead. Right now, Roy just wanted to breathe. The sharp night air felt good. The ground underfoot, hard with frost, crunched with each step. Maybe, Roy thought, he would start running through the orchards, over the sloping hills, just keep running. Never come back. -- RJ

Three more shots sent him outside for air. He took deliberate steps, his boots crunching on the gravel drive and then slightly slipping on the little pockets of ice on the trail leading to the orchard. As a child he had loved smashing the iced-over puddles with rocks from the stone wall, and he and Sarah would venture out onto the larger puddles, scaring each other as the spider-webbing cracks sounded like snapping tree branches echoing off the barn's steep sloped roof.

"What are you going to do with her, Roy? Just throw her in a home? She insisted we not do that to Dad, but we're going to do that to her?" Sarah had been furious. Roy had actually checked to make sure his seatbelt was on when her vocal pitch started to ascend and he realized she wasn't watching the road nearly as much as is prudent for safe driving.

They had gotten together for another lunch. It seemed to him that's what people of a certain class did when confronted with some form of domestic crisis, convene a series of meetings, usually over food, under the guise of finding a credible solution, usually by throwing money at the problem. Sarah could have been a consultant on this method of conflict resolution.

When her teenage son started smoking pot, she paid to send him to boarding school. When she suspected David, her husband, was sleeping with the real estate broker they had used to buy their house, she hired an expensive private detective to take hundreds of inconclusive pictures of him running errands, most of them on Sarah's behalf. And when her body started responding to the unkind urgings of Earth's gravitational pull, she more or less purchased the breasts and ass of a 23 year old. But suddenly money, it seemed, was a shortcut in solving the problem of what to do with their mother. Suddenly she insisted on taking the high road.

"Sarah, there is no way she can stay in that house, not one month longer. She will be fine at Pine Grove. It's a good facility."

Facility. The word had all of the charm of a just-pulled hand grenade. It made him think of Lysol and pee and crazy people. The government lab that he worked in was a facility. No, Pine Grove was not a very pleasant place, he knew this. But he decided he could put her there without remorse. Especially after what she had done to him. --JV

Roy and his sister had driven over in separate cars, alone in their thoughts. Coming up the long dirt drive, Roy's late-model Buick had soaked up the ruts, heaving like a pleasure boat cutting through whitecaps. The twisted, bare apple trees had flashed by in the headlights.

Roy thought of this as he worked the sponge across the wall.

Why not take his time, he thought. Why not give the old place an honorable sendoff, a last hurrah? Why not really scrub those damn walls, look around a bit, soak in some memories? He dropped the sponge in the bucket.

Walking to the pantry, Roy ran his right hand along the narrow hallway wall. The faded wallpaper's crazy little red robins and jays were still perched on berry bushes and slender branches after all these years. "This is for you guys," Roy said softly as he reached into a small cabinet. He pulled out a fifth of Old Turkey, untouched since his father's last ambulance trip six years ago. With a nod to the wallpaper aviary, Roy poured a finger's worth into a cloudy tumbler and threw it back. - RJ

Her instructions were ridiculous, yet, perhaps out of guilt he walked slowly to the pantry for a plastic bucket. The new owners -- who he was sure would refer to the property in sentences like, "We'll be down at The Farm this weekend," and "You both should join us at The Farm this fourth." -- would no doubt hire a battalion of cleaners to nearly gut the place before another army of hired helped carted them in on moving day.

The warm water ran down the faded paint under the glare of a single bulb, vulgar in an ugly shadeless lamp. He watched his ten foot shadow fold where the floor met the opposing wall, his giant silhouetted arms moving the sponge up and down, the suds from the dish liquid mixing with decades of nicotine leaching from the cracked and chipping plaster. - JV