Even though I’d been finding all sorts of new ways to receive her messages (with varying degrees of effectiveness), Jennie had a way of reaching out to me at moments when it was extremely inconvenient for me to try to respond. Like when I was hanging on for dear life to a pole on a crowded bus. I’d run out of patience for the pendulum; asking Jennie yes-and-no questions could be extremely time-consuming, and I couldn’t exactly whip it out in public places.

I did my best to try to ignore the tingles. Whatever it was that Jennie was trying to communicate didn’t matter; I had to be at work in fifteen minutes to clock in.

The moment I stepped into the assisted living facility, I was grateful for its excessive air-conditioning. I passed through the lobby, where an elderly man was playing the grand piano for the amusement of several women, some of whom were playing mah-jongg. The lobby had several enormous fish tanks, which were among my favorite things about working there. I tended to take my fifteen-minute break in the lobby just to stare at the fish.

On my way to the bathroom to change into my scrubs, I was greeted by Luis, my manager. “Slight change to your rounds today, honey,” he said. I might have taken offense to my boss calling me “honey” except that Luis referred to everyone as “honey.” He was an overweight gay man in his forties who seemed to have gotten to know every single resident in the home personally, which endeared him to me. “We’ve got a new resident in the Daytona wing. Her name is Mrs. Robinson. If she hasn’t already placed a dinner order with the kitchen by the time you check in on her, could you walk her through the process?”

The assisted living facility had three floors, and there were four corridors on each of them. My rounds included the east corridor on each floor, each of which had six resident rooms along it. It might not seem like checking in on eighteen senior citizens would take me four whole hours, but every day, it did. I was almost at the end of my shift—the sun had already started setting—by the time I had my first encounter with Mrs. Cherie Robinson, Oscawana’s newest resident.

When I knocked on the door to her room, I heard a raspy voice call out, “Come in!”

A thin, frail Black woman sat in the upholstered chair in the corner of the room. Her walker was set beside the chair, and as I entered the room she didn’t turn away from her television set, which was tuned in to the local news. “Hi, Mrs. Robinson. I’m McKenna, your evening aide.”

“I know,” she told me without looking at me. “The nurse told me somebody would come by to help me order dinner. They left a menu around here, but I can’t read a damn thing on it.”

“I can help you with that,” I said cheerfully. Many of the residents had difficulty with farsightedness, but within a few days at Oscawana they usually realized that the cafeteria options didn’t change much from day to day, so being able to read the menu wasn’t that important. My eyes scanned the room for where the nurse might have left the menu.