Map · Establishments · Pine Ridge Senior Care
An establishment near Harmon
A hallway that smelled like urine and a woman in a wheelchair facing a wall. He’d stood in that hallway, and seen that woman, and walked out and sat in the car for fifteen minutes with his jaw so tight his teeth ached.
— The Good Father
Pine Ridge has been on Route 9, four miles north of town, since 1978. It is the county’s cheaper eldercare option, $3,200 a month and fully covered by insurance, and it carries the things cheapness carries in such places: the smell in the hallway, the woman in the wheelchair facing the wall. It is thirty minutes from the North End, eight minutes past Lakeview on the same road.
Moving Helen here would close the gap that is destroying David Marsh in The Good Father, $1,200 a month, the exact difference. He cannot do it. David knows the hallway from the inside: from 1989 to 1992, every Sunday afternoon, ages six through nine, he visited his own grandmother, Helen’s mother, here in Room 8 down the west corridor after her first stroke. The Pine Ridge attending of that era was the old Dr. Robert Mercer, father of the neurosurgeon Neil. The place David refuses is the place the Seer’s warning is really about: Loss B, the move, is a thing David would have to do, and so he does the other thing instead.
Pine Ridge recurs as the county’s eldercare backdrop, the facility on the rural road where the series’ aging parents are managed, and where, in the later books, Dr. Patricia Alvarez served fifteen years on the medical advisory board before the Hartwick hospice. It is one end of the Route 9 axis the books keep driving: town at one end, the places we send the people we cannot keep at the other.