After the Emergency

By the time Rebecca got Leo settled in a curtained bed at Mercy, her knuckles had started to shake.

The nurse had cleaned the cut over her eyebrow, taped two fingers, and told her she needed to sit still for ten minutes. Rebecca stood anyway, one hip against the wall, phone in hand. Thirty-seven dollars sat in her account. Rent was still eight hundred behind. Her shift at Sam’s All Night Diner had already been blown to hell.

Leo lay under a scratchy blanket with a sticker on his shirt and a mask over his face. He was calmer now, but his eyes kept tracking the door.

“Mom?”

“I’m here.”

“Are we in trouble?”

“No.” She looked at the monitor, the tubing, the paper wristband. “You’re fine. Just breathe slow.”

A pair of boots stopped in the doorway. Rooster ducked in with his cap in his hand. He had paid the copay before she could argue. That made her jaw set harder than the stitches did.

“I said I’d handle it,” she told him.

“You said a lot of things.”

He set the paper bag from the pharmacy on the table. Inhaler refill. Spacer. A box of crackers for Leo. He had probably asked three questions and gotten everything in one shot.

Rebecca stared at the bag. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to pay you back.”

“Kid’s breathing. We’ll call that even for tonight.”

That should have made her angry. It did and didn’t. She hated owing anybody. She hated the feel of being cornered more.

A nurse came by with discharge papers for Leo, then looked at Rebecca’s swollen wrist and the bruise blooming down her shin.

“Ma’am, you should be seen too.”

“I’ve got a job.”

“Ma’am.”

Rebecca pressed her lips together. “I can’t stay. Phil’s got half the crew gone already.”

Rooster looked at her a second. “Then go in hurting. But go.”

She almost laughed at that. “That’s your advice?”

“That’s the truth.”