My Daughter Told The Hospital I Had “No Family” So She Wouldn’t Have To Drive Me Home After My Knee Surgery. The Volunteer Who Wheeled Me To The Curb Read My Wristband And Asked If I Used To Drive The County Bookmobile

The nurse who discharged me was a nice girl named Brianna with a butterfly tattoo on the inside of her wrist, and she was sorry about it. I could tell she was sorry because she kept fixing the blanket on my lap that didn’t need fixing.

“So your transport is all set, Mrs. Kessler,” she said. “Case management arranged a cab. It’s a voucher, so you don’t have to pay anything. The driver will take you right to your door.”

“A cab,” I said. “To Ickesburg?”

“Is that far?”

“It’s forty-one miles, honey. Most of it is Route 74.”

She looked down at her clipboard. She flipped a page, and then flipped it back.

“It says here you don’t have an emergency contact. It says no family.” She said it gently, the way you tell somebody they have spinach in their teeth. “Normally we don’t like to send a total knee home without a responsible adult. But since there’s nobody, the social worker signed off on the cab and a nurse call tomorrow morning.”

I was seventy-one years old, a day and a half out of surgery, with a staple line down my leg like a zipper on a winter coat, a walker with tennis balls on the feet, and a white plastic bag of pills.

But I was not so foggy that I didn’t understand what she was telling me.

My daughter had driven me to West Shore Regional at five-thirty in the morning on Thursday. She had filled out my paperwork at the registration desk while they took me back to get my gown on. She had kissed me on the forehead in pre-op and said, “I’ve got a closing in Lancaster, Mom. Call me when you’re out.”

And somewhere on that paperwork, under Emergency Contact, she had written that I didn’t have one.

Karen

I have one child. Her name is Karen. She is forty-six years old, she lives in a stone-front townhouse in Mechanicsburg, and she sells real estate for one of the big companies on the Carlisle Pike. Her face is on a bench outside the Giant on Trindle Road.

Her father, my Ray, was a milk inspector for the state for thirty years. He died in 2014 of a heart attack in the cab of his truck at a farm outside Millerstown, with the engine still running and a clipboard on his knee. Karen took it hard. She was his girl.

She’s divorced now, two years. Her daughter Lily is eleven and lives with her most of the week. Lily reads under the covers with a flashlight, which I’m told is not something children do anymore, and which made me so happy when I heard it that I had to sit down.

Karen calls on the drive between showings. The calls last as long as the drive. If she pulls into a driveway in the middle of a sentence, she says, “Mom, I’ve got to go, I’m here,” and she’s gone.

When my orthopedic doctor in Harrisburg told me the left knee was bone on bone and had to come out, I called Karen first.

“Of course I’ll take you,” she said. “Just send me the date.”

“They say I’ll need somebody to drive me home after. And maybe stay a night or two. I can’t do the porch steps for a while.”

There was a pause on the line. I could hear her turn signal ticking.

“Let’s figure that out when we get there,” she said.

We never figured it out. I should have known that was what the pause meant.

No Family

I asked Brianna if I could see the form.

She brought me a printout from the computer. My name, my birthday, my Medicare number. Under Emergency Contact, in the box where you type a name, somebody had typed NONE. Under that, in the notes, it said: Pt states no family in area. Pt will arrange own transportation home.

“I didn’t state that,” I said. “I was in a paper gown with an IV in my hand when this was filled out.”

“I’m so sorry,” Brianna said. “Do you want me to call someone? Is there someone we should call?”

I took out my phone. I called Karen. It rang five times and went to her voicemail, the professional one: You’ve reached Karen Weidman with Keystone Hearth Realty. I’m with a client right now, but your call is important to me.

I didn’t leave a message. I texted her instead.

They’re discharging me. They said you told them I have no family.

The three little dots came up, and went away, and came up again.

Mom I’m so slammed today. The Hoffman closing fell apart and I’m trying to save it. They said a cab was fine, it’s covered. I’ll call you tonight. Love you.

I read it twice. Then I put the phone face down on the blanket.

“No,” I told Brianna. “There’s nobody to call.”

That was the first time in my life I ever said it out loud, and it turned out to be the first time it wasn’t true.

The Wristband

They don’t let you walk out of a hospital. They wheel you. A volunteer came at two-fifteen to take me down to the main entrance where the cab would be.

He was an older man, maybe in his sixties, tall and a little stooped in the shoulders, in a maroon volunteer vest with a name tag that said WALT. He had big careful hands and reading glasses pushed up on his head. He moved me from the bed to the wheelchair like he’d done it ten thousand times, which I suppose he had.

He hung my bag of pills on the back of the chair and folded the walker and tucked it under his arm somehow and pushed me down the hall.

In the elevator he stood beside me and looked at the numbers going down. Then he looked at the plastic band on my wrist. I saw him do it. People don’t look at your wristband, usually. It’s like looking at someone’s mail.

He looked at it for a long time.

KESSLER, DOROTHY M. DOB 04/02/1955.

The elevator opened on the lobby. He didn’t push me out. The doors started to close again and he put his hand out to stop them without looking.

“Ma’am,” he said. “I’m sorry. This is going to sound strange.”

“I’m seventy-one and they took my knee out with a saw. Strange is fine.”

“Did you used to drive the county bookmobile?” His voice did something on the last word. “Perry County. The big green and white one. Did you used to drive Route Four?”

I looked up at him. I looked at his hands on the handles of my wheelchair, and at his face, and at his ears, which stuck out a little.

“Tuesdays,” I said slowly. “Route Four was Tuesdays. Blain, Sandy Hill, out past Fort Robinson, and the stop at the end of the Hostetler lane.”

He took his glasses off his head and held them in his fist.

“I was the Hostetler lane,” he said.

Route Four

I drove the Perry County Bookmobile from 1974 until they sold it in 2005. Thirty-one years. It was green and white, with shelves on both sides and a little step that came down when you pulled a lever. In the winter I wore fingerless gloves and the kids came up the steps with snow on their boots.

And at the end of Hostetler’s lane on Tuesdays, at ten past two, there was a boy.

He was eight the first time. His mother had died that winter. His father ran a dairy farm with sixty head and did not talk, not to anybody, and certainly not to an eight-year-old boy who cried at the supper table. The boy walked half a mile down the farm lane to the township road every Tuesday and stood by the mailbox in whatever the weather was, and when I came around the bend he’d already be waving.

“Do you have any more about the body?” he asked me that first summer. “About how the heart works? Not baby ones.”

I didn’t have much. So I started bringing him things. I’d go to the main branch in New Bloomfield on Mondays and pull anything I could find. Books about the heart and the lungs and the bones. A big gray book called The Wonders of the Human Body that he checked out so many times the spine cracked.

He was a lonely little boy, and I knew it. We talked on the step of that bookmobile for ten minutes every Tuesday for nine years. He told me what he’d read. I told him what I thought he’d like next.

His father wouldn’t drive him into town to return things when he missed a week. So the fines added up. Two cents a day for a children’s book, five for an adult one. And when he lost a book in the creek one spring, the replacement was six dollars and ninety-five cents.

I paid them. All of them. Out of a Maxwell House can I kept under the driver’s seat. I never told him. I just told him the library had forgiven it, and he believed me, because he was nine.

“Walter Hostetler,” I said in that hospital lobby. “Wally. You had a cowlick right here.”

“Still do,” he said. “It’s just gray now.”

The Curb

The cab was waiting under the overhang, a yellow minivan with the side door open. The driver was a young man eating sunflower seeds and looking at his phone.

Walt wheeled me up to it. Then he stopped.

“Where’s your family, Mrs. Kessler?” he asked quietly.

“My daughter’s at a closing.”

“And who’s at your house?”

“Nobody. Ray passed in 2014.”

“How many steps up to your front door?”

“Five. And then four more inside to the bathroom. It’s an old farmhouse.”

He stood there a minute with his jaw working. Then he walked over to the cab driver, and I watched him say something and hand the young man a folded bill. The driver shrugged and closed the side door and pulled away.

Walt came back.

“I’ll drive you,” he said.

“Walter, you can’t. You’re working.”

“I’m volunteering. It’s not the same thing. They’ll forgive me.” He smiled, and there was the eight-year-old, right there behind his face. “Somebody told me once that’s what libraries do.”

He went and got his car, a dark green Subaru Outback with a dog blanket in the back, and he got me into the passenger seat the way the physical therapist had shown me, bad leg first, and he put the walker behind me and buckled my seatbelt like I was a parcel he was mailing.

On the way out of Camp Hill he told me the rest. He’d gone to Penn State on scholarship, then medical school at Pitt. He’d been a heart surgeon at Hershey for twenty-three years. He’d retired in 2022. His wife, Anne, had died the year after, and he’d started volunteering at West Shore because the house was too quiet and he didn’t know what else to do with his hands.

“A heart surgeon,” I said.

“You brought me the books,” he said. “I’d say you’ve got about forty percent of the credit.”

We laughed so hard going over the Clarks Ferry Bridge that I had to hold my knee.

The Kitchen

My house sits up a gravel drive off Route 274, a white farmhouse with green shutters that Ray painted every other summer and that nobody has painted since. Walt pulled up close to the porch and sat looking at it.

“Five steps,” he said. “No railing on the left. And that bottom one’s rotted.”

“I know about the bottom one.”

He got me up those steps one at a time, him behind me with his hands on my hips and the walker going ahead, and it took us almost ten minutes. By the top I was sweating and shaking and trying not to cry, not from the pain so much as the embarrassment of it.

Inside, he walked straight to my refrigerator and opened it.

There was half a gallon of milk, a jar of apple butter, and three eggs. I had meant to go to the Weis in Newport before the surgery.

He shut the refrigerator door. He stood with his hand on it.

“Dorothy,” he said. “Were you planning to do this alone?”

“I wasn’t planning anything. I thought Karen…” I stopped. “I don’t know what I thought.”

He nodded. He took out his phone and walked into my front room, and I heard him talking low.

“Patty? It’s Wally. No, I’m fine. Listen. Do you remember the bookmobile lady? Mrs. Kessler? … Yeah. Yeah, her. She’s home from a knee replacement and there’s nobody here. No, nobody. I’m standing in her kitchen.”

A pause.

“Okay. Okay. I’ll be here.”

He came back in and pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down across from me.

“That was my sister,” he said. “She’s going to make a few calls.”

“Walter, please don’t make a fuss.”

“Mrs. Kessler,” he said. “With respect. You don’t get a vote.”

The Maxwell House Can

Walt stayed that night. He slept on the davenport in the front room under Ray’s old afghan with his feet hanging off the end, and twice in the night I heard him get up and come to my bedroom doorway to check that I was breathing, which I suppose heart surgeons can’t help.

In the morning he went looking for my medication list so he could set up my pills in one of those Monday-through-Sunday boxes. I told him it was in the top drawer of the hutch.

It was. So was something else.

He came into the kitchen holding a spiral notebook with a green cover gone soft as felt. It had been in the bottom of that drawer since 2005. I had forgotten it was there. That’s not true. I had never once forgotten it was there.

“Dorothy,” he said. “What is this?”

On the front, in my handwriting from fifty years ago, it said: FINES PAID — NOT TO BE MENTIONED.

He sat down and opened it. I didn’t stop him.

Every page was columns. A date, a first name and a last initial, a stop on the route, an amount. 3/12/74 — Wally H. — Hostetler lane — .46. 6/4/74 — Wally H. — .18. 4/22/75 — Wally H. — book lost in creek — 6.95.

His name was on almost every page for nine years. I watched him run his finger down them. He found the creek one and put his hand over his mouth.

“You told me they forgave it,” he said through his fingers. “I remember. You said the library forgave it.”

“The library did forgive it. I was the library on Tuesdays.”

But it wasn’t only him. That was what he kept turning the pages to see. Darlene S. — Sandy Hill.Tommy and Ricky B. — Loysville church lot. The Gutshall girls — Ickesburg. Hundreds of entries. Thirty-one years of nickels and dimes out of a coffee can, for farm kids whose parents wouldn’t or couldn’t, so nobody ever got their card taken away.

At the bottom of the last page he’d added it up himself, in pencil, the way surgeons check things.

“One thousand, one hundred and eighty-three dollars and twelve cents,” he said.

“Over thirty-one years. That’s not much.”

“On a bookmobile driver’s salary in 1974? It’s a lot.”

Then he turned to the inside of the back cover, and he went quiet in a different way. I knew what was written there. I’d written it at the kitchen table on a June night in 1990.

Karen — dance recital, 6/9/90. Missed it. Bookmobile broke down in Liverpool. Owe her.

And under it, in other inks, other years:

Karen — 4th grade play. Missed. Owe her.

Karen — science fair, ribbon. Late. Owe her.

Karen — 16th birthday. Route ran long. Owe her.

It went on for most of the cover. Walt read it all and didn’t say a word. He closed the notebook and set it on the table between us very carefully, like it might go off.

“I paid everybody’s fines but one,” I said. “Hers just kept getting bigger.”

The Ramp

By nine o’clock that morning there were four pickups in my driveway.

Patty Hostetler Zeigler had made her calls, and it turned out the people she called made calls, and somebody’s daughter-in-law put a post on the Perry County community page on Facebook with a picture Walt had taken of the green notebook — just the cover, nothing inside. It said: Who remembers the bookmobile lady? Mrs. Dorothy Kessler drove Route 4 for 31 years. She’s home alone after knee surgery. We’d like to say thank you.

By lunchtime it had nine hundred comments. Walt read some of them out loud to me while I sat in Ray’s recliner with ice on my knee.

“‘She saved me the new Nancy Drews before anybody else got them. Darlene Shuey, Sandy Hill stop, 1979.'”

“‘Mrs. Kessler taught me to read on the step of that bus when I was ten and too embarrassed to tell my teacher I couldn’t.'”

He had to stop on that one. So did I.

The men from the Blain fire company came with lumber and a chop saw on a Saturday morning and built a ramp from my driveway to the porch, pressure-treated with a rail on both sides, and replaced the rotten bottom step while they were at it. One of them was Ricky Book, who I’d last seen at eleven.

“You still owe me a dime, Mrs. Kessler,” he yelled up from the sawhorses. “You told me you’d find me the Allis-Chalmers one.”

“I found it, Ricky. You never came back for it.”

“I was busy being eleven.”

A physical therapist named Jen Gutshall, one of the Gutshall girls, showed up in scrubs on her day off and walked me up and down my own hallway and told me I was doing great, which was a lie, but a kind one. The ladies from Ickesburg Methodist set up a sign-up sheet on my refrigerator, and by Sunday I had casseroles in labeled foil pans through the end of the month.

I sat on my porch on Sunday afternoon in a lawn chair with a cushion under my knee, and watched people I hadn’t seen in forty years carrying things up a ramp that hadn’t existed two days before, and I thought: I told that nurse I didn’t have anybody.

Karen Comes Home

Karen came on Sunday evening, at a quarter to seven, in her white Lexus with the Keystone Hearth magnet on the door.

She sat in the car a long minute, looking at the ramp, the foil pans on the porch table, the Subaru with the dog blanket in the back.

When she came up the ramp she had her phone in her hand, and her face was the color it goes when she’s scared and has decided to be angry instead.

“Mom, what is this?” She held up the phone. The Facebook post. “My broker sent me this. Three of my clients sent me this. ‘Home alone after knee surgery.’ Do you know what this looks like? Do you know what people are saying?”

“I can imagine.”

“They’re saying I abandoned you.” Her voice cracked on it. *“I didn’t abandon you. I had a closing. I told them a cab was fine because a cab was fine, people take cabs.”

Walt had come out onto the porch behind me. He didn’t say anything. He just stood there with a dish towel over his shoulder.

“And who is this?” Karen said.

“This is Dr. Walter Hostetler,” I said. “He drove me home. When the hospital put me in a cab, because my chart said I didn’t have any family.”

She looked at Walt. She looked at me. She opened her mouth and nothing came out.

“I wrote it so they wouldn’t keep calling,” she said finally. “That’s all. I wrote ‘none’ so they wouldn’t call me in the middle of the Hoffman closing. I was going to call you that night.”

“You did call that night,” I said. “For four minutes. From the car.”

Walt went inside. He came back out a minute later and set the green notebook on the porch table beside the casseroles, opened to the inside of the back cover. Then he went back in and shut the screen door very quietly behind him.

Karen looked down at it.

I watched her read it. Dance recital. Missed. Owe her. Fourth grade play. Owe her. Sixteenth birthday. Owe her. I watched her get to the bottom, and then go back up to the top and start again.

She sat down on the porch steps. Not the ramp. The steps.

“You wrote these down,” she said.

“Every one.”

“I thought you didn’t know,” she said. “I thought you didn’t even notice. You came home every night talking about Wally and Darlene and the Gutshall girls, and I’d be sitting at the kitchen table, and I’d think, she knows every kid in this county by their first name and she doesn’t know I had a recital.”

“I knew,” I said. “I knew every time.”

The Parking Garage

She didn’t leave that night. She stayed and helped me into my nightgown, which I hadn’t been able to do for myself, and she sat on the edge of my bed in the lamp light the way I used to sit on the edge of hers.

“Can I tell you something awful?” she said.

“You’re my daughter. You can tell me anything awful you want.”

“After I filled out that form, I went out to the parking garage, and I sat in the car on level three, and I cried for twenty minutes.” She was twisting the hem of my bedspread. *“Not because I felt bad. Well. Because I felt bad. But mostly because I was glad. I was glad I’d gotten out of it. And then I hated myself for being glad, and then I drove to Lancaster and the Hoffman closing fell through anyway.”

“Oh, honey.”

“I’m so tired, Mom. Since Greg left, I’m so tired. I do every showing. I do every school pickup. I have eleven listings and one kid and no help, and when you said you’d need somebody for a few nights, all I could think was, when is it my turn to have somebody?“

She was crying now, my forty-six-year-old girl.

“And then I wrote ‘no family’ and I thought, that’s fair. That’s what it felt like growing up. It’s her turn.“ She looked up at me. “That’s the awful thing. I did it on purpose. A little bit. I wanted you to know what it was like.”

I reached out and took her hand. My knee screamed about it and I didn’t care.

“Well,” I said. “Now I know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too. I’ve been sorry since 1990. It’s written down.”

She laughed, wet and awful, and put her head down on the bed next to my hand, and I stroked her hair the way I did when she was little, and neither of us said anything else for a long time.

Owe Her

Karen stayed four nights. She drove into Mechanicsburg for showings and came back after dark with groceries.

On the fifth day she called the hospital and had them change my chart. I listened from the recliner.

“Emergency contact is Karen Weidman, daughter,” she said. She spelled it. “And add a second one. Walter Hostetler. H-O-S-T-E-T-L-E-R. No, he’s not family. Well. Put him down anyway.”

Walt drove me to every physical therapy appointment for six weeks. He said retired heart surgeons have nothing but time, which I didn’t believe, and that driving a bookmobile lady around was the least he could do, which I believed even less. We talked the whole way, every time. About his father, who it turned out had kept every report card Walt ever brought home in a Prince Albert tobacco can in the milk house, and never said a word about any of them.

“He couldn’t talk,” Walt said. “But he kept the can.”

“Most people can’t talk,” I said. “Most people keep a can.”

Lily came out the first weekend in December. She is long and skinny with her mother’s dark hair and her grandfather’s serious eyebrows, and she walked straight to the bookshelf in my front room and stood in front of it for an hour without saying a word. When Karen called her for supper she came to the table with three books under her arm.

“Grandma,” she said. “Can I borrow these?”

“You can borrow anything in this house.”

“What if I don’t bring them back on time?”

Karen and I looked at each other across the table.

“Then I’ll forgive it,” I said.

The Card

In January, when I was walking on a cane and driving again, Walt came for supper. He brought a loaf of bread from the Amish stand in Loysville and a small white envelope that he set by my plate.

After he left, I opened it at the kitchen table.

Inside was a library card. Not the plastic kind they have now. The old kind, buff-colored cardstock, gone soft and gray at the corners, curved from fifty years of riding in the back of a man’s wallet. Across the top it said Perry County Free Library — Bookmobile Service. The name line said Walter Hostetler, in a little boy’s careful pencil.

Under it there was a line for a parent or guardian to sign, because back then a child needed one.

His father had never signed it. I remembered now. I remembered standing on the step of the bookmobile on a cold Tuesday in March of 1974, and a little boy holding up this card with an empty line on it, and his chin shaking.

So I’d signed it myself. It was right there. Responsible party: D. Kessler. In blue ballpoint, in my handwriting from when I was nineteen years old.

On the back, every line was stamped with due dates, purple and faded, nine years of Tuesdays, one after another all the way down.

And under the last stamp, in pencil, in the same careful hand, only older now, he had written one more line.

Returned.

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