Chapter 10: Money for the Doctor

The paper was still warm through her coat. She got the two packets out and gave one to Bobbie and one to Frankie.

Frankie stopped crying with the first bite in her mouth. Bobbie unfolded hers and looked in at it, and then up at Nell.

“Is this meat?”

“Eat it.”

Bobbie ate it. Nobody said anything else for as long as the food lasted, and when it was gone Bobbie folded the paper flat on her knee and smoothed it with her hand.

“Where’d you get it?” she said.

“I borrowed it.”

“From who?”

Nell took the cloth off the basin and wrung it out and put it back on her mother’s forehead. The heat came up through it into her fingers right away.

“Bobbie. Coat. Go get Mr. Rankin. Tell him it’s Mama and it’s bad and we need the car.”

Bobbie didn’t move. She was twelve, and she could hold a question on her face a long time without letting it out, and she did that now.

“Go on.”

“Okay,” Bobbie said, and went.

Frankie had finished hers. She watched Nell’s hands and asked nothing, because Frankie was seven and believed that things came to Nell out of the air.

“Frankie. You sit with her and keep the cloth wet, and you don’t open that door for anybody.”

Nell put one hand flat on her coat, over the money, just once, to be sure of it, and then went and stood at the door where she could watch the road.

Otis Rankin came up the path the way old men come out on a cold night, hat on ahead of the rest of him.

He stood in the doorway and looked at Darlene on the cot, and at the basin, and at the two girls with grease on their mouths.

“Where’s Roy?”

Nobody answered him. He looked at the cot a while longer.

“She’s burning up,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “You got money? Because the man up there won’t take eggs.”

“I got money,” Nell said. “I borrowed it.”

Rankin looked at her. He had been around long enough to hear a corner folded over in a story, and he heard it in hers, and he didn’t say one word about it.

“Get her in the car,” he said. “The girls ride as far as my place. Ruth’s got the room off the kitchen, she’ll feed them in the morning.”

Her mother was heavier than she looked, and hot through her dress. Rankin took her under the arms and Nell took the feet on the side away from the bad shoulder, and between them they got her down the path and into the back seat with her head on Nell’s leg.

Frankie wouldn’t get up front with him, so Bobbie did, and Frankie rode in back with Nell and her mother.

Rankin pulled in at his own house with the engine running. The porch light was on and Ruth was in the doorway with a coat over her nightgown before the girls were out of the car. She looked past them at Darlene laid along the back seat and didn’t ask. She took Bobbie by the shoulder and Frankie by the hand, and Bobbie looked back once from the door, holding the question, and then the door shut.

Rankin put the car in gear again and pulled his door shut on the cold.

The heater worked about half. There was one yard light behind them and then nothing at all until the crossroads, and after the crossroads the lights came up closer together, and that was the only clock she had.

Her mother’s head rocked on Nell’s leg. “Tell him I’ll pay him.”

“You will.”

Rankin had put the gas in his own tank and given up a night’s work out on somebody’s fence line to be here tonight, and he drove with both hands on the wheel at a speed he could hold on that road, and he was the only person who had come.

“Tell him I’ll pay him,” her mother said again, and then, not to anybody, “I’m not staying in there.”

Nell pulled the coat up over her and held it. The hospital came up on the left with every window lit.

The doors were glass and the light behind them was so bright after the road that she had to squint. Inside, it smelled like pine cleaner and hot dust. Her mother was along the wall on a stretcher with Rankin standing at the end of it, and there was a woman behind a window with a form on a clipboard.

“Name.”

“Vance. Nell Vance. It’s my mother, Darlene Vance.”

The woman asked for the road they lived on. Nell gave her that, and then there wasn’t anything else to give, so the woman asked who was going to be responsible for the bill.

“Me.”

The woman looked at her, and then past her at Rankin standing behind her, and wrote something down.

“Is there a man coming? Husband? Father?”

“No.”

She asked whether there was insurance on her mother, and Nell said no.

Then the money. The woman counted the bills twice and wet her thumb and wrote a figure down on the form, and Nell watched the hands and not the page. What was left the woman pushed back across the counter with two fingers, and Nell folded it up small and put it inside her coat and did not count it there.

Then a man came and wheeled the stretcher back through the doors.

The waiting room had a row of chairs bolted to a rail and a radiator ticking along the wall under the window. Rankin sat down in the end chair and took his hat off and put it on his knee, and after a while his chin went down on his chest and he was asleep with his hands still holding the hat.

A woman cried at the far end of the hall with her hand over her mouth, the way people cry when they are trying not to, and the man standing with her didn’t touch her.

Nell walked down to the bathroom and locked the door and counted the money on the edge of the sink. Her hands shook. She lost the count twice and got it the third time. She drank at the fountain on the way back and flattened the paper cup in her fist and dropped it in the can.

It was a long while. Then a man in a white coat pushed through the doors with a chart in his hand.

“Who’s here for Darlene Vance?”

Nell stood up.

“She’s got a cracked shoulder blade,” he said. “She’s past the worst of it, and she’s staying the night. You can see her once they take her up.”

They took her up a little after two, a nurse pushing the cart around the corners. There were four beds in the room, and two of them had people in them. The nurse showed them the bell and said something about the hours and about keeping the aisle clear, and went out again.

Her mother’s good hand came up and found her shoulder and stayed there.

“Nell. What’s this costing?”

“Don’t think about it tonight.”

“Don’t tell me that.” Her mother waited on her breath and went on. “You tell me what it costs. A bed in here is money every night and the doctor is over and above it, and we don’t have that kind of money. You know we don’t.”

“I’ve got money.”

“Where’d you get money?”

It came from the second bed.

“There’s people in here trying to sleep. You come in off the road at two in the morning with your whole family and you carry on in here like it’s the bus station.”

Nell stood where she was with her coat still on. Her mother’s hand had not moved.

“Some of us have paid for a bed in this room,” the woman said. “We’d like to sleep in it.”

She lay back down and turned her face to the wall and pulled the sheet up over her ear.