• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

What they did tell him over the next week was still more information than he’d ever wanted to know. The threats to the country seemed more severe than the daily briefings had made them out to be when he was just a candidate. The debt crisis sounded worse; the health care and child care and education systems all sounded as if they were beyond repair. Day after day he was shown figures, charts, data, algorithms, predictions by think tanks, names of famous people who might be trying to overthrow the country, bridges that were about to collapse, hurricane predictions, and on and on and on.

At the end of the fourth day he told Betsy he believed these transition periods were only set up to take the wind out of the sails of any new administration. “If there is a shadow government, this would be one way to make a new president feel powerless.”

Betsy took another approach. “You have nothing to lose. If it’s that bad, all you can do is make it better. Does the First Lady still get her own staff?”

“Of course.”

“There you go. Things are looking up already. What about the spacemen?”

“I asked. There aren’t any.”

* * *

Kathy and Brian sat on a couch in Sue Norgen’s office. Sue again suggested that maybe the conversation should just involve direct family and she was told again that Brian could stay. Sue never made it her decision. If family members wanted others present at times like these, it was their choice, and quite frankly she didn’t really care. She pulled up a chair and faced Kathy, only occasionally glancing at Brian.

“Your father was shot at work, as you know.”

“I don’t know anything! This is the first information I’m hearing.”

“He was shot at the school, one bullet in the left collarbone.”

“Oh my God.”

“Fortunately, it did not go into his heart, but he has lost a lot of blood, and the bullet was so deeply lodged that they had to remove quite a bit of bone to take it out. The nerve in his left shoulder may or may not have been damaged.”

“What does that mean?” Kathy was trembling.

“It means that we won’t know for a while if he is going to lose any movement or feeling in that area.”

“How much movement could he lose?”

“I don’t want to speculate. It may be fine or he may lose the ability to move his arm.”

“Oh, no. Oh God.”

“I think it’s much too early to speculate. I’m just giving you the details that we have now and the information that will pertain to his recovery. He will need to stay in the hospital for a week and then he might need extensive physical therapy.”

“I understand,” Kathy said. “Whatever he needs.”

This was the part Sue didn’t like. Kathy did not understand. No one did until they were told. For the most part, Sue liked her job, but she never understood why the task fell to her to explain basic economics. So many people thought these expenses were just paid for out of thin air. Do they teach nothing in high school anymore? “Kathy … may I call you Kathy?”

“Yes,” Kathy said, knowing that that expression never led to anything good.

“Your father does not have a comprehensive insurance plan.” Kathy’s face was expressionless. She knew what was coming. But it was much worse than she thought. “As a matter of fact, he has no real insurance at all. His universal coverage lapsed a year and a half ago when he stopped making the minimum payments.”

“But he was going to make those payments up. That’s why he took that job.”

“I understand, but he didn’t. If you let your co-pay go unpaid, the government guarantee of health care is void. It is everyone’s responsibility to keep that payment going.”

“Well, can I get the money somehow and pay the co-pay myself?”

“It’s too late for that. When the government saw that too many people simply stopped their end of the bargain, just waiting until they got sick to resume their payments, they passed very strict laws regarding co-pays. It’s really the same as a mortgage. If you miss your mortgage payment, you lose your house.” Kathy was getting angry.

“We got behind in our mortgage and we didn’t lose our house.”

“How many months did you