Indiscreet Box Set

Chapter 4-1

Chapter 4Despite his protests, the limousine driver insisted on driving Brian directly to his building. It was only two-thirty in the afternoon, not his usual five-thirty. He saw Miz James through her front window as he mounted the stoop. Brian Murphy hurried to climb the staircase to his furnished room. He did not want a conversation with Miz James. She made him very uncomfortable.

Too bad for me she caught up.

“Home a little early, Mr. Murphy?”

“Yes Miz James, I got the afternoon off.”

“Humph,” she said as she disappeared down the other wing.

He sighed. He got off lighter than he expected. Miz James was usually good for a thirty-minute or longer interrogation. He mounted the stairs up to the fourth floor.

He used a single key to unlock the deadbolt and security lock he had installed. He had the security set keyed to open both the deadbolt and the new lock on the doorknob. Miz James had objected, but he stood firm. He agreed to pay an additional security deposit to have the locks and the door replaced when he left, but he wanted to feel safe where he slept.

He entered his room, put his keys and a small amount of change in a garage sale dish on the dresser and sat down on the plastic-covered overstuffed chair to think about what happened to him that day. In an eye blink, his circumstances had changed.

Maybe he could accelerate his plans for mom’s move and eventually his own. Then he looked about and faced the grim reality.

He saw a single bed, dresser, his chair, and a closet all stuffed into a twelve by thirteen space in the attic room of his Clinton walk-up. There was the quilt and the two wedge pillows. He had bought a quilt to make the bed seem like more of a sofa when he moved in right after college. He remembered that he only planned to stay for a month or two before moving on to better digs. Back then, he had dreams.

He closed his eyes and remembered everything that happened to bring him to this point of his life. Brian was going to save enough to buy himself a one-bedroom condominium in town and a small used car. He wanted a flat screen TV and a DVD player, all of the toys that boys loved. Those dreams flourished before he found out his mother didn’t do any of the things he had asked her to do to see to her welfare until he graduated.

He planned to help. He knew it was his responsibility to support her, but when she told him she was ill, he had only a month until graduation. He knew the amount of his future salary depended heavily on his degree, so he had to finish school to be able to take care of both of them.

He did ask her how bad things were, but she reassured him she could hold out for a month. Later, he found out that although she was out of work for over six months, she never applied for unemployment or disability and therefore was not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid. She did not contact Social Services to ask for assistance, even though she qualified.

In the interim, her heart gave out. Smoking for all those years combined with poor nutrition, intermittent medical care, and stress, led to heart failure. Once he got home, he helped her fill out the forms for Social Security Disability and used some college connections to obtain a waiver to make her eligible for Medicare immediately plus supplemental social security income payments.

After she received her Medicare card, Medicare claimed her heart was not bad enough to receive a heart transplant right away.

Yet, mom could no longer care for herself and her bills were astronomical. Irene was responsible for the deductibles and copayments that by law, the doctors were not permitted to waive, even for indigent patients.

Brian heard the news about his mother’s heart while he was on the train coming home from graduation. She gave the hospital his name and cell phone number as her emergency contact.

They told him she was malnourished and had not filled her prescriptions, so her heart condition worsened.

He met her at the hospital, and though her condition was grave, Irene survived. A hospital charity organization paid some of the bills, but the rest were her responsibility. Thus, it became Brian’s load to bear. It took almost a year of work before Brian cleared out the last of the outstanding medical bills. He managed to do so by living in Miz James’ Hilton.

He got up from his chair and pulled a can of lukewarm Coke from his small cooler. Damn it, I forgot to buy ice. He sat down on the chair and attempted to read the newspaper, his one indulgence. He couldn’t sit still. Memories kept intruding on his concentration.

He put his mother on the company medical plan immediately, so there were no additional medical bills to worry about, or so he thought. The company plan paid for office visits with a co-p*****t of only four dollars. Any emergency room visits, especially for a heart patient, were free. These were all good things and did a lot to ease Brian’s fear of the future. However, his mother was unable to live alone.

While Irene was in the hospital, in addition to the medical mess, he discovered she owed almost six months in back rent because of her inability to work. She kept promising the landlord that her son would take care of it.

As soon as Brian entered the building the first night, he had to use his meager savings to prevent the landlord from throwing her things out into the street. Brian paid him because he had no choice. He paid the tab until the end of the month and gave notice. He could not afford to keep the apartment and pay someone to stay with his mother full time. He had to work to keep ahead of her bills, and her apartment was too small for both him and a caregiver. He had to settle her financial affairs before she could enter any of the programs the social workers described to him.

He had a week. The hospital staff told him Irene would be discharged after only a few days. His own heart almost stopped.

When they noticed his panic-stricken face, they assured him his mother could transfer to an acute care facility for about five days.

He had time to make arrangements. There was the alternative of putting her in a charity facility, but he had visited a couple of those places on the hospital’s list, and they reeked of urine and neglect.

Even with the outstanding medical bills, she was unable to declare bankruptcy under the new stringent laws. He knew he had to find a solution quickly. Irene’s neglect of her health and financial situation brought about the crisis and he could not in good conscience permit her to continue to live that way. His only solution was his father’s sister, Aunt Mary.

He got up from his chair. The late afternoon sun beat down on the roof and his room had little ventilation. He removed his Dockers and Mr. Drummond’s shirt and carefully folded both so he could take them to the laundry on Saturday morning. He took the top sheet off the bed. Then, he fished a few of the remaining ice cubes out of the cooler and rubbed them over his chest and arms. The ice cooled his body enough to make the room livable for a while longer.

Try as he might, his mind refused to settle and move away from his dealings with his Aunt Mary and his mother. Brian sighed, the movie in his head continued uninterrupted. By the time Irene transferred to the second facility, she was coherent enough for Brian to sit her down and insist on knowing everything. He unearthed, in addition to the landlord, a number of utility bills and an unpaid balance on her MasterCard of fifteen hundred dollars, all now his responsibility.

After considering his limited set of options, Brian realized he had to bring Aunt Mary into the picture. Until he was able to pay off both Irene’s medical bills and her outstanding living expenses, he could not pay for both an apartment and a caretaker, so Aunt Mary was the only answer.

Aunt Mary readily agreed. However, she didn’t ask Brian if he wanted to stay with his mother until he got on his feet again, although she knew Brian had already obtained a good job. It was just as well Mary did not ask. Mary lived too far out of town for Brian to commute. The bus routes did not cover the rural area of Allentown where she lived and would take Irene. When he visited his mother on Sundays he had to walk three miles to and from her home. Aunt Mary refused to pick him up at the bus stop.

Once, Aunt Mary had at least been cordial to Brian. When he came out of the closet at eighteen, his father’s sister disowned him. However, Mary was the only choice left.

Brian flung himself out of the chair and took the wedges off the bed so he could lie down. He usually tried to sleep through the worst of the heat. He could not shake his train of thought.

He remembered her last call.

“Brian, this is your aunt.”

As if I do not know your voice by now.

“Your mother went to the doctor today and I am considerably out of pocket.”

“Mary, Mom has an insurance card. I discussed this with both of you the last time I visited. She presents the card and it covers the visit with the exception of four dollar co-pay which Medicare picks up.”

“I don’t recall that conversation. She must have misplaced the card. I paid sixty-five dollars and I need it back immediately.

I can’t keep on shelling out money for her, Brian, and waiting for you to pay me back.”

“I’ll make sure you get back the money in two days, Aunt Mary. I will FedEx a check and another insurance card. If mom can’t keep track of it, can you do it for her?”

“I do enough for your mother for the pittance you give me, Brian. I should just put her out on the street and let you care for her, as you should be doing already. My electric bill and my gas bill have both gone up as well as my water and sewer.”

“How much would it take to cover it for a while longer?”

Brian asked with a sigh.

“Oh, around two hundred and fifty dollars extra per month should suffice.”

“Aunt Mary, I’m not a fool. One elderly woman doesn’t run up two hundred and fifty dollars of utility bills a month.”

“She does if you want her to continue to live with me, Brian.”

“I’ll include it with the check and the insurance card. Please try to remember the insurance card, Mary.”

“The extra two fifty will help my memory, but only for a while Brian.”

Brian remembered banging his fist against the dresser, but all that brought him was an unwelcome visit from Miz James who accused him of damaging her property. He told her to take it out of his deposit.

It was not long before he realized that putting mom with Mary was a mistake of massive proportion. He began to receive bills from all of his mother’s physicians. Mary claimed Irene did not tell her about the new insurance and she was not aware of it until Brian mailed her the card personally. Since Aunt Mary had not presented the insurance card to the doctor, they automatically assumed Irene was on Medicare. Brian made a deliberate decision to send his mother to physicians who did not participate in Medicare. He wanted his mother to have the best care available.

He chose her physicians from several “Best Doctor” lists and did this because his research showed that his insurance would be primary, since she was his dependent.

Without his insurance, Brian had to pay cash and in addition he had had mounds of paperwork to file in order to recover what he had to pay out of pocket because of Aunt Mary’s inconvenient memory. To say nothing of the amount of time it took for reimbursement.

Brian maintained the polite fiction that Aunt Mary didn’t know about the card, though they both knew what she had done and why. What was worse; Irene had been helpless to stop her.

She had become extremely depressed and unstable because she was such a burden to her son. The depression meant psychiatric care and psychological counseling. The counselor scolded Brian for making Irene believe she put the weight of the world on his shoulders. If though, in Brian’s mind it sometimes it seemed that way, he never said a word.