Thursday Visits
On Thursdays at 5:45PM, Meg’s daughter, Elle, drives forty five minutes to at Stony Brook Nursing Home. She comes with two cups of black coffee and a blueberry muffin for Meg from the Dunkin Donuts down the street. Typically, they sit in the lounge, a common area on the second floor containing a couch and three small tables covered in cheap paper tablecloths; however, when the weather is nice they go out to the small, cement patio in the back of the building. Most days they talk for hours. Elle tells Meg a story about her eccentric boss or her daughter’s new obsession with buying a puppy, and sometimes Meg offers a story about her encounter with an irritable nurse or the exceptional piano player that comes to perform every other Sunday. Mostly Meg just listens. She loves hearing Elle talk about her life, no matter how much it makes her miss her own.
Everyday at Stony Brook follows the same, painfully dull routine. Breakfast starts at nine o’clock, and it usually consists of stale bagels and cold coffee. After breakfast, the residents are free to do what they please until lunch. Meg usually sits in her room and reads a book or discusses the previous evening’s entertainment with people in the lounge. The afternoon entertainment, often a sad performance from an aspiring comedian, follows lunch.
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For months she had been trying to ignore the smell of antiseptic that wafted through the building, the constant squeaking of the nurses’ shoes on the linoleum floor, the unforgiving fluorescent lights in every room, and the feeling of despondence that most of her fellow residents seemed to share. She told herself that she didn 't need to worry about becoming just like her cynical roommate, because she had a beautiful granddaughter and a wonderful daughter who came to visit her every