Twenty-seven years old and already a wrinkled and achy mother of four, husband injured at his job in this country with so many rules and benefits that he can stay home accumulating government assistance and watching me out of the corner of his eye, though sometimes I forget which one can see.

“Don’t go to work,” he tells me so many times. “It’s shameful.”

But I don’t see it that way. What’s shameful is an able-bodied man sitting at home on his no-good ass watching his wife clean and cook and do mothering things while he spends all his government assistance money on nothing: a couch with plastic covering and beer that he shouldn’t be drinking in the first place.

What’s truly shameful is those funny-looking four children holding their bellies and stealing candy bars from 7-Eleven because no one gives them enough of anything to take their aches away.

So one of those lovely spring mornings that smells of familiar flowers, I decide to go to work. It takes a while but it’s not too long before I find a job as a nurse’s aide at Desert Acres Convalescent Hospital, which means I work ten hours a day wiping drippy asses with skin so loose it’s like used-up cheesecloth dripping with rotted fruit. Smells like that too. No one says thank you, only speak louder because they think if you don’t speak their language, well, that it also means you don’t hear very well and that you’re dumb.

“Oh, girl,” calls one withered white lady with skin like dough, cold and powdered. “Girl, could you adjust my bed, please.”

I get stuck on the word adjust for a minute and look at her. Just as it clicks in my head she raises her voice. “Girl, please adjust my bed so I can sit up.”

My ears are ringing, but I do what she wants. The convalescent hospital is old, with old walls and old beds and old plumbing, just like the people they’ve got stored up inside of it.

“Thank you, girl,” she says and pats my arm, which surprises me because most of them try to avoid touching you at all, even though you have to touch them in all sorts of places that should make an arm touch not too shameful.

I guess I don’t blame them. Their bodies don’t work, their minds have wandered off to meet old friends and new horizons, and their own families treat them like they are idiots.

At home such a thing would never happen. At home an old person is revered and cared for. At home most women don’t work. Mixed-blessing kind of place, I suppose.