The blue folder is what I remember first.
It was that cheap kind they hand out at county offices, the cardboard soft from being carried around. The woman holding it found me at the Riverside Laundromat on a Thursday afternoon in March, three years after I quit working for Mrs. Delgado. I was folding work shirts and trying to decide if I had enough quarters left for the dryer when she walked up and said my name like a question.
“You’re Jenna Kowalski?”
I looked up. She was maybe fifty, gray hair pulled back, wearing scrubs under a winter coat. I didn’t recognize her.
“Yeah.”
“Did you work for Carmen Delgado? As a home aide?”
My hands stopped. One of my shirts was still bunched in my fist. I just stood there looking at her and that folder, and I knew before she said another word that Mrs. Delgado was dead.
The woman’s name was Patricia. She worked for Juneau County Senior Services, doing occupational therapy assessments and follow-ups. She asked if we could sit down for a minute. There were two plastic chairs near the vending machine, and we sat. She set the folder on her lap and kept her hands flat on top of it like she was holding something down.
Mrs. Delgado had died eight months earlier. Pneumonia, then complications. She left most of her small estate to the Ridge View Senior Center where she used to volunteer before her knees got bad.
Six thousand seven hundred dollars. Patricia said the center director asked her to track down the aides who’d worked for Mrs. Delgado over the last few years because there were some things in her files they thought we should see.
I told Patricia I only worked for her four months. That was true. April through July, 2019. Seventeen dollars an hour, three days a week. Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays. Two hours each visit. I helped with her pills, made sure she ate lunch, did light cleaning. Mrs. Delgado lived alone in a little one-story house on Polk Street with a porch that needed paint and a bird feeder she filled herself until her hands started shaking too much.
Patricia opened the folder. Inside were maybe a dozen sheets of paper, some printed, some handwritten. The handwriting was shaky but careful. Mrs. Delgado’s writing. I recognized it from the grocery lists she used to leave on the kitchen counter for me.
“She kept notes,” Patricia said. “Every week. Dated. About things she wanted reported to her family.”
I didn’t say anything. My throat felt tight.
Patricia pulled out the first page. It was dated April 12, 2019. A Friday. The day after my second visit.
*Asked Jenna to tell my daughter about the locked medicine cabinet. Isabel has the key. I can’t reach my blood pressure pills.*
I remembered. Mrs. Delgado’s daughter Isabel lived two towns over in Baraboo and came by maybe once a month. She’d installed a locking cabinet in the bathroom for the prescriptions after Mrs. Delgado accidentally double-dosed on something the year before. Isabel kept the key. But then she started forgetting to come by and refill the weekly pill organizer, and Mrs. Delgado would run out by Wednesday or Thursday. She asked me to call Isabel. I said I would. I didn’t.
I told myself it wasn’t my job to get in the middle of family things. I was just there to do the tasks on the care plan. That’s what my supervisor at the agency said when I asked once about another client. Stay in your lane. Families are complicated.
Patricia turned to the next page. April 19.
*Asked Jenna again about the medicine. Also asked her to tell Isabel the meals from the program are too much food. I can’t finish them and they spoil. I don’t want to waste.*
Mrs. Delgado was on Meals on Wheels. They dropped off lunch every weekday, but the portions were huge and she barely ate. Her fridge was full of those foil-covered plates, the food going bad because she didn’t want to throw it away. She was from a generation that didn’t waste. She asked me to tell Isabel so Isabel could call the program and adjust the portions.
I said I’d mention it. I never did.
The notes kept going. April 26. May 3. May 10. Every single Friday, Mrs. Delgado sat down and wrote what she’d asked me to do that week. There were notes about the broken porch railing, about the neighbor’s dog that got loose and scared her, about a bill from the clinic she didn’t understand. All things she asked me to tell Isabel or to help her call about.
I did none of it.
Patricia didn’t look angry. She looked sad. She said the other aides had similar notes. One worked before me, two worked after. All of us got the same requests, all recorded the same way. Mrs. Delgado was trying so hard to get someone to listen.
“Why didn’t she just call her daughter herself?” I asked. My voice came out thin.
“She did. Isabel’s phone records show dozens of calls that spring and summer. Most of them under a minute. Mrs. Delgado would forget what she’d already said, so she’d call again. Isabel started letting them go to voicemail.”
I thought about Mrs. Delgado sitting in that house alone, trying to remember if she’d already called, trying to figure out why no one was helping. I thought about how she’d smile when I came in on Tuesdays, how she’d have the grocery list ready and a cup of weak tea poured for me even though I never drank it. She was trying to be polite. Trying not to be a burden.
Patricia pulled out another page. This one was printed, not handwritten. It was an email dated July 14, 2019. From me. To my supervisor at the home care agency.
*I’m giving my two weeks’ notice effective immediately. I’ve accepted another position. Thank you for the opportunity.*
I’d sent that on a Sunday night. I didn’t go back to Mrs. Delgado’s house after that. The agency sent someone else. I told myself I was moving on to a better job. That was part of it. But the real reason was I couldn’t stand going back there and seeing her ask me things I wasn’t going to do. It felt easier to just leave.
“The aide who came after you lasted five weeks,” Patricia said. “Then she quit too. Then there was a gap where no one came at all. Isabel finally moved her to an assisted living place that September.”
“Is that where she died?”
“No. She was only there four months. She fell in the bathroom and broke her hip. After that she went to a nursing home for rehab and never came out.”
The laundromat was warm and loud with the sound of the dryers tumbling. Someone’s phone was ringing on the other side of the room. I kept staring at the folder.
Patricia reached in and pulled out one more page. It was smaller than the others, torn from a different notebook. The handwriting was worse, like it had been written by someone whose hands were shaking hard. It was dated November 8, 2019. Four months after I left.
There was only one sentence.
*You knew I was dying.*
Not a question. A statement. And it wasn’t addressed to Isabel or the agency or anyone who might’ve been able to fix things. It was addressed to me. My name was at the top of the page.
*Jenna, You knew I was dying.*
I looked at Patricia. “She wasn’t dying. I mean, she was old, but she wasn’t, “
“She knew,” Patricia said quietly. “Maybe not the specifics. But she knew something was very wrong and nobody was helping and it wasn’t going to get better. That’s what she meant.”
The page sat on top of the folder between us. I couldn’t stop looking at my name.
Mrs. Delgado didn’t put that note in with the weekly ones. She kept it separate. Patricia said it was folded up inside a small wooden box on Mrs. Delgado’s dresser along with some old prayer cards and a photograph of her late husband. The kind of box you keep your most important things in. She kept that note there for two years. Carried it with her to the assisted living place, then to the nursing home. It was in her belongings when she died.
“I don’t know what you want me to say.” My voice cracked.
“I don’t want you to say anything.” Patricia started putting the pages back in the folder. “The center director thought you should know she remembered. That’s all.”
She stood up. I stayed sitting. She handed me the folder.
“These are copies. You can keep them if you want. Or throw them away. That’s up to you.”
She left. I sat there holding the folder with the dryers going and my shirts still half-folded in the basket and people walking past me to get to the change machine. I opened it one more time and looked at that last page. My name in her shaky handwriting. Five words.
*You knew I was dying.*
I did know. Not that she was dying exactly, but I knew she needed help and wasn’t getting it. I knew the locked medicine cabinet was a problem. I knew she was lonely and confused and trying so hard to do everything right, to not bother anyone, to just get someone to listen. And I walked away because it was easier than staying.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that now. I can’t go back and fix it. Mrs. Delgado is gone. I can’t apologize. I can’t explain that I was young and the job paid terrible and I didn’t think it was my responsibility to parent someone else’s mother.
But she knew. That’s the part I keep coming back to. She knew I saw it and I left anyway. And she wrote it down and kept it in the box with her husband’s picture and her prayers, and that’s how she carried it all the way to the end.
I still have the folder. It’s in the bottom drawer of my dresser under some old sweaters. I don’t look at it. But I know it’s there. I know my name is on that page. I know what it says.
You knew I was dying.
I did.
