Client Declined Services

The home support worker arrived at eight-forty on Thursday the twenty-first, four days into the packing, with a laminated badge and a bath chair folded under one arm.

Wren had the kitchen half-boxed. Newspaper on the counter, the good plates in a laundry basket because she'd run out of dish barrels and the U-Haul on Harvey wanted nine dollars apiece.

"Morning," the worker said. "Dennis Adaeze?"

"He died. The eleventh."

The worker didn't flinch, which Wren respected. She shifted the chair to her other arm and took out a tablet in a rubber case the colour of a traffic cone. "Sorry to hear that. Let me see what I've got."

"You've got a bath at eight-forty. It's on the calendar." Wren pointed with a dish. Her father had kept the schedule himself, in pencil, on a Rotary Club calendar hung beside the wall phone. BATH TH 8:40. MEDS TU/F. FOOT CARE 2ND WED. Capitals. He'd switched over sometime the previous winter and never said why.

"That's what I've got too." The worker turned the tablet so Wren could see it, which she probably wasn't supposed to do. A column of visits. Green checkmarks down the left.

"That's this month."

"That's this month."

The eleventh had a checkmark. So did the fourteenth, at eight-forty, bath, completed, 34 min, with a signature line filled in by a stylus. A flat scribble that could have been anyone's, and Wren had no idea what her father's signature looked like anymore. She'd last seen it on a birthday card in 2019 and that had been a stamp.

"I wasn't here on the fourteenth," the worker said. "I'd have known."

"Who was?"

"It doesn't give a name. It gives a closed visit." She scrolled. "Sometimes the tablet syncs late and backfills. That happens."

"It backfilled a bath."

"It backfilled something." She set the chair down, and the aluminum feet made

She wrote on the flap of a box, safe — deed, passport, rings, meds return to pharmacy, and then put the letters and the February printout together into the manila envelope that already held the certificate and the green slip, because they were the same kind of document and she was done pretending otherwise.

Downstairs on Monday the mail brought an envelope with the health authority's return address and her father's name in the window.

A lab requisition. Not the green one. A fresh one, generated the twenty-second, CBC and ferritin and A1c, standing order renewed against an open care plan, collection date printed for the twenty-sixth.

Tomorrow.

She drove to the lab on Springfield at seven the next morning. She could not have said why in a way that would survive being asked. Everything so far had been a voice and a checkmark. She wanted a counter, and a person behind it, and a screen that would say the thing the phone wouldn't.

Nine people ahead of her, mostly fasting, everyone holding their coat. She took a ticket, B-Fourteen. The chairs were moulded, bolted in rows of four. A television ran a flu-shot loop with the sound off, captions half a second behind. Somebody's phone rang and three people checked their pockets.

At seven-twenty a tech called B-Fourteen.

Wren put the requisition on the counter. "This is for my father. He's deceased."

The tech was maybe twenty-five, blue scrubs, a lanyard with three cartoon pins. "Oh. Sorry." She had already scanned the barcode, the way you scan a barcode, without deciding to.

The screen took it.

Wren watched from the wrong side, upside down: a record opening, a name in the header, DOB, PHN, three tests populating a panel with empty boxes beside them where the results would go.

"It's live," Wren said.

"Sorry?"

"His number. It took it."

"It wouldn't know." The tech looked at the screen, then at Wren. "We don't get that from here. That's upstream." She made a small circle at the ceiling, meaning the file, meaning a man on leave until the eighth. "It has to close at the source."

"Can you close it?"

"I can void the requisition." She was already doing it. "That's this one. Not the standing order. It'll cut another in thirty days."

"And then another."

"Until somebody closes it, yeah." The panel greyed.

"That panel. Ferritin, A1c. That's monitoring, not screening."

The tech's hands stopped. "I'm not allowed to interpret."

"I'm not asking you to interpret. I'm asking what it takes to have it run on me."

"A requisition. Which is a doctor. Which is —" She stopped. "You'd want to bring the family history."

"The family history is a decline entry and a pamphlet."

"Then bring the pamphlet," the tech said, and printed the void slip, and stamped it, and Wren took it, because taking paper had become the thing she did.

She was at the door when the tech, back on the counter and onto the next ticket, hit the intercom and read out the name at the top of her queue — the record that had been open on the screen thirty seconds earlier and had not yet cleared.

"Dennis Adaeze. Dennis Adaeze to station three."

A woman by the window looked up. A man folded his newspaper. The room did what rooms do, waiting to see who stands.

Wren stood.

It took her three steps into the aisle to understand that she'd done it, and by then the tech had seen her and gone through it in real time: the screen, the name, the woman in the aisle. "Sorry. Sorry. B-Fifteen. B-Fifteen, please."

A man with a cane got up.

Wren sat in her car in the lot for eleven minutes without starting it. On the passenger seat, four pieces of paper: green, white, void, pamphlet.

She called Sundaram's office from the lot. The receptionist said the doctor was away. Wren said she understood, and that she was asking for a requisition in her own name, and gave the reason. The receptionist said new patients weren't being accepted and that the walk-in on Cooper opened at nine, and put her through to a voicemail that was full.

Saturday cleared the house down to what the sale hadn't wanted: a chest freezer nobody would carry up the stairs, the bath chair with a sticky note on it, and the wall phone, which was hardwired and therefore a fixture and therefore the buyer's problem.

Sunday she came back at seven for the last load. The furnace ran and she could hear the ductwork ticking the length of the hall, thirty years of that going on under everything else.

Two boxes by the door, both marked KEEP. The Corningware, the tin of rings, the deed, the letters, the manila envelope with all the paper in it.

The calendar was the last thing on the walls. Rotary Club, 2025, a lake that wasn't the lake, still turned to August because neither of them had turned it. Thirty-one boxes and his capitals in pencil. BATH TH 8:40. MEDS TU/F. W BIRTHDAY on the sixth, which was her mother's, seven years after. On the eleventh, nothing, because he only wrote down what was scheduled.

She took it off the nail. Behind it, a rectangle of wall two shades darker than the rest, sharp-edged, exactly the size of the calendar. He had been buying the same one and hanging it on the same nail long enough to burn its footprint into the paint.

The pencil had smudged where his palm rested, dragging BATH into a grey comet. She could throw it out. It was a calendar, from a year nearly over, for a man who was dead.

The furnace shut off.

"I forgive you for keeping everything," she said, and rolled the calendar and put it in the box, curved on top of the Corningware, and taped the flaps.

The chair she carried to the driveway and set beside the recycling with the sticky note still on it, because the file was open and things rented to an open file are not yours to throw away. She wrote the address on a slip and put the slip in the envelope with the rest.

At the door she checked the mailbox out of habit. Nothing in it.

Nothing was how she'd know.