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Lunch was in full swing by the time I left Anne’s office. I’d spent forty-five minutes with her, sinking into the under-stuffed, lumpy guest chair in her office as she went over how each activity had gone during the week I was cruising the Caribbean and trying to avoid being arrested for murder.
I’d been right about last week and the current state of affairs at Oasis Ridge.
Everything was just as I expected.
Fine.
Everything was fine.
I followed Aidan, one of the personal care assistants, as he wheeled a resident down the hall in front of me, heading toward the dining room. He was close to my age, somewhere in his mid- to late twenties, and I knew he was in school, finishing up his bachelor’s degree. In what, I didn’t know.
He must have heard me behind him because he turned around and smiled over his shoulder. “Welcome back. You all refreshed and relaxed and ready to get back into the swing of things?”
“I don’t know about that,” I joked as we stepped into the dining area. Even though we worked in completely different departments, our paths tended to cross several times a week, since one of his jobs as a PCA was to transport residents to and from activities.
The tables in the dining room were already half-filled with residents, many of whom were already spooning soup from steaming bowls. Monday was always tomato soup, and several diners had paper napkins tucked into their shirts to serve as makeshift bibs.
Denise, one of the serving staff, carried a tray filled with plates of food. Breaded chicken cutlets and rice pilaf and glazed carrots were on the menu.
Her face lit up when she saw me. “Sunny! Welcome back!”
I was beginning to feel like I’d been gone a month, not a week, based on the way people were greeting me. I had to admit, it was sort of nice to be missed.
“Find a seat, missy,” Denise told me as she served the residents sitting at one of the four-top tables in the room. “Gonna fill up fast. There’s chocolate cake for dessert.”
Oasis Ridge always served dessert, and most were hit or miss in the taste department. But the chocolate cake was always good, and residents who often opted to stay in their units or go out for their noonday meal would stick around just for this particular dessert.
I saw an empty seat at the table where Earl Lipinski was sitting.
“Mind if I join you?” I asked.
He shook his head. Earl was in his mid-seventies, with a thick shock of white hair and a matching moustache and beard. With his rounded cheeks and twinkling eyes, he looked like Santa Clause’s thin twin.
“Where you been?” he asked. “Missed you around here.”
“I was on vacation. A cruise.”
His bushy eyebrows arched high. “A cruise, eh? Never been on one of those.”
“You aren’t missing much,” I told him with a smile.
He guffawed. “Spent a bunch of years in the Navy and sailed all over the world. I've seen enough of the ocean.”
Denise stopped at our table and set down a plate in front of each of us. “Save room for dessert,” she reminded us.
Earl looked over his meal, at the soggy chicken and the pile of lumpy rice pilaf and the glazed carrot coins that looked like they were swimming in a sea of butter. “Can’t we just skip to that?” he grumbled.
Denise smiled cheerfully, revealing a mouthful of metal. Even though she was probably twice my age, she’d decided late in life that she wanted straight teeth. She’d been in braces since my first day at Oasis Ridge, and judging from what her orthodontist told her at her monthly appointments, she was going to be stuck with them for the long haul.
“You can do whatever you want with your lunch,” she said to Earl. “But dessert isn’t coming out for a good twenty minutes.” She hurried off to get more plates.
I slid my fork into the pile of rice. The food wasn’t terrible at Oasis Ridge, but it wasn’t exactly good, either. I’d gotten used to the cafeteria taste of things; after all, Lola, the cook, was responsible for making enough food to feed, on average, over a hundred residents at each meal. The community had enough units for 200 residents, but some of those apartments and rooms were vacant, and some residents chose not to come to each meal. Still, feeding a hundred people three times a day was no easy task, and I was sure her primary focus was on having an adequate amount of food available for each meal.
Besides, taste wasn’t a huge consideration for me. The thing that kept me coming to the dining room was that my meals were included as part of my compensation package. So I wasn’t going to complain if the rice was a little too salty and the carrots were a little too buttery.
Billie shuffled by with her walker, lowering herself into a chair at the table just to our left.
“Smells good in here!” she practically yelled.
I nodded and smiled. The tables were filling up. Arthur Griggs and Mary Uhlrich, Oasis Ridge’s resident sweethearts, were already seated at their table near the coffee. Arthur was sniffing his plate suspiciously, a frown on his wrinkled face, while Mary stirred the cup of tea in front of her. She was newer to Oasis Ridge than I was but I’d already learned that she had tea with all of her meals.
Ruth, another resident I was friendly with, was seated with a few women at another table close by. She dressed for every meal as though she were headed to a five-star restaurant. I grinned when I saw the pearls around her throat and the enormous rings decorating several of her fingers. I often wondered just how many of her pieces were costume jewelry or the real thing.
“You gonna eat that?” Earl said, motioning to the yeast roll still sitting in the breadbasket.
I snatched it and set it on my plate. I didn’t much care if I ate it or not, but I knew the baskets that were brought to the table had one roll for each seat. Since Earl and I were sitting alone, that meant he’d already eaten three.
“I didn’t see you at the movie this morning,” I said to him. “Are you going to make it to the discussion this afternoon?
He frowned. “It was An Affair to Remember?”
I nodded.
He harrumphed. “I don’t much care for Cary Grant.” His frown deepened. “All the ladies thought he was so handsome.”
“I’m sure you were just as handsome as he was back in the day, ” I reassured him.
Earl’s bushy eyebrows rose high. “More handsome,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.
We ate our meal and Earl asked me questions about the cruise. I answered with generalities and a few white lies, which appeared to satisfy him.
Before long, Denise was headed back toward us, her tray loaded with slices of the much-anticipated chocolate cake.
Ruth stopped her just as she neared our table. “Lunch is taking an awfully long time to serve today,” I heard her say.
Denise nodded. “We’re short staffed. One of the other gals—Patty—called out sick.”
“Sick?” Ruth said.
“A cold, I think,” Denise told her. “She’s coughing up a storm. And you know we can’t have that in the dining room.”
Ruth’s eyes rounded. She spun the rings on her hands, thinking for a second. Then she put her hands on the armrests of her chair and pushed herself into a standing position. “Can I help?” she said. “I used to be a waitress, you know.”
Denise shot a glance in my direction. I had no idea what to say. I mean, if it had been up to me, I would have handed her the tray and told her to have at it. Revisiting a previous job had the potential to be wonderfully therapeutic for someone her age, especially if she was voluntarily offering to do it.
But Denise apparently didn’t think this. She shook her head as she slapped plates of chocolate cake down in front of Ruth and her three dining partners. “Nope, you just sit down and enjoy your chocolate cake. No need for you to help.”
“I used to be a car hop,” Ruth told her. “And I wore roller skates! I could deliver food in here with my eyes shut.”
“I bet you could,” Denise told her. “And I would have loved to see you on roller skates!”
She was so good with the residents. From what I’d heard, Denise had worked on the dining room staff at Oasis Ridge for years and truly seemed to love her job. She never complained, and she never lost her temper with the residents...not even when they grumbled about the food or the service.
But Denise was not a saint. She might put on a professional act for the people she worked for, but the people she worked with? Now that was anther story. She was as feisty as they came, and as much as she drove me nuts sometimes, I had to admit I liked her. Immensely.
There were two pieces of cake left on her tray and she brought these to me and Earl.
“Here you go,” she said, sliding the bigger of the two pieces in front of Earl.
He glanced at my cake and then me, his expression hopeful. “You planning to eat that?”
I took in his tall, gaunt frame. He ate like a horse. Where did he put it all?
His own slice of cake was already halfway gone.
I pushed my plate toward him.
“You can have it,” I said.
His eyes lit up. “Really?”
“Really.”
He grinned. “You know something, Sunny? I like you.”
I smiled back. “I like you, too, Earl.”
And I did.
I just wished I liked my job, too.