Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [17]
“I’m sorry.” Nadine pointed to his other sister in the photo. “And this is…?”
“Stacy. She’s three years older. She’s staying with me for a while.”
“With you and your wife?”
“I’m not married.”
“And your mother and father, how are they doing?”
“I can tell family’s important to you, isn’t it?”
“Family is everything. Family and Jesus.”
Zak remembered how her mother had watched over her in the beanery, how her brother and the family friend had fetched cake for her and made sure she had a place to sit, how they’d tried to include her in their conversations even though she’d been a reluctant participant, and now she’d given them all the slip.
“My father’s living with me, too, but only until he gets his own place.”
“And your mother?”
“My mother died the year before I got into the department.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what I would do without my mother.”
“Mine had breast cancer. She beat it back the first time, but we didn’t have any insurance, so she was facing these huge bills—and then it came a second time, and she didn’t take any treatment. We weren’t as close as I wish we had been. I think about that sometimes and wish I could change it. But…”
“Why would she do that? Why would she forgo treatment?”
“She never admitted it was money, but I’m pretty sure it was.”
“You must miss her.”
“Yes, I do.”
They thought about that for a moment or two as they stood in front of Zak’s open locker, his folded sheets on a shelf, spare uniforms pressed and hanging neatly. Nadine perused the rest of the photos on the inside of his locker door and then spotted a racket hanging on the wall. “Racquetball?”
“Yes. Do you play?”
“Mostly I play tennis, but I love racquetball.”
“If you have time, we could play right now,” he joked. “I’ll spot you five points because of the crutches.”
She laughed. “Where on earth would we play racquetball around here?”
“There’s a court downstairs.”
“You don’t have a court downstairs.”
Holding the bunkroom door open for her, Zak escorted Nadine across the apparatus floor then led her down the single flight of stairs to the basement, where they stepped inside a small court with a basketball hoop at one end and a row of screened windows on the street-side wall.
As she surveyed the small court, Nadine said, “I miss sports so much.”
“A couple of years ago I crashed into a horse and broke my collarbone, so I know how you feel.”
“You crashed into a horse?”
“On my bike. It’s a long story.”
They were silent for a few moments until Nadine said, “I overheard somebody upstairs talking about a patient you had today. They said her blood pressure was three hundred over a hundred thirty? Could that be right?”
“Yes, it was right. She’d had a headache for two days.”
“What did you do for her?”
“Called the medics, got her on O-two and up to the hospital.”
“Why would her blood pressure be so high? Isn’t normal something like one twenty over seventy?”
“Exactly, but she’s traditionally had high blood pressure, which she’s controlled by medication. She ran out of the meds.”
“That was kind of careless, wasn’t it?”
“She ran out because she couldn’t afford to buy them any longer.”
“So why didn’t she go to the hospital a long time ago?”
“No money.”
“Not even a credit card?”
“This might be hard, but use your imagination. No credit cards. No checking account. No savings. No daddy. No big-screen TV in the other room she might hock. Nothing but a crummy apartment with broken-down furniture and maybe a bus pass to get her downtown to her job five days a week and then to her other job all day Saturday. Babysitting on Sunday.”
“You don’t have to talk to me like that.”
“Maybe not, but if you can’t pay, you go bankrupt, lose everything you and your family have, and then you’re in debt for the rest of your life. It’s part of why my mother chose to die rather than suffer the indignities of debt collectors and all the rest of it. She’d already gone through that once. I guess I’m a little bitter