Grace waits. She sees Dr. Lighthart darting across the corridor, and several times Amy comes back with a patient, ignoring Grace.
“Hello,” Dr. Lighthart says, slightly out of breath. “I’ve often wondered about you. Amy told me you were here and wanted work.”
“I do.”
“How’s your daughter?”
“Fit and healthy, thank you.”
“Can you start now?”
“Yes,” she says, “I can.”
“The front desk is a mess. Do you think you could sort through the piles of paper and put them in order and label them so that I could take a quick look after work?”
“I will.”
“Good.”
He disappears as suddenly as he came. Grace finds Amy and asks if she knows the order of patients and who came in first. Amy shakes her head and replies, “If you can, practice some triage. If a person looks as though he or she is deathly ill, I’ll take those first. And any child with a high temperature.”
Grace swallows.
In the waiting room, Grace asks the crowd a simple question. “Do you know who got here first?” There’s a moment of silence, and a woman points across the room. “That man there.”
“Okay, I’m going to go around the room in the order you all think is first-come, first-serve. Just tell me your name and how you feel.”
In the next few minutes, Grace crisscrosses the room, writing down names and symptoms on the back of a telephone bill. With a frightening uncertainty, she develops her own triage, putting some names at the top of the list.
“Are you in labor?” she asks a woman with splayed legs.
“Not yet, miss, but this is my sixth, and I can tell something isn’t right.”
The woman should be in a hospital. Grace puts her at the head of the line. When Amy appears in the doorway, Grace gives her the list. Amy calls the name of the pregnant woman, who can barely walk across the floor.
Grace sits at the desk, and tries to look official in the gray suit her mother remade to fit her. She finds a clean piece of paper on which she can write the names of the newcomers to the clinic when they come in. After that, she stacks all of the papers that were already on the desk into a large pile. She whisks off all of the coins and dollar bills and puts them into the top right-hand drawer. When the rest of the desk is clean, she lifts a handful of material and sorts by dates, the most recent first: bills in one pile, checks in another, Dr. Lighthart’s notes, letters from patients, medical reading material, official forms. She opens every envelope, reasoning that she can’t complete her job without doing so. She tries, when she scans a letter, to ascertain which pile it belongs to without reading all of the details. She’s invading privacy, she knows, and she doesn’t want to pry. As she works, individuals enter the waiting room and walk to the desk, where she records their names and symptoms. Amy and the doctor will be working nonstop for hours.
When Grace is finished with the sorting, she hustles to the kitchen to find plates to lay on each of the piles so that they won’t blow about when someone opens the door. She writes notes identifying the piles, and tapes them to the plates. The scheme looks unprofessional at best, but it’s all she has to work with. When finished with the top of the desk, she begins to search through the drawers. There are five, two on either side of her skirt, a horizontal one in front of her. One drawer is so stuffed with material, Grace can’t, without a knife, get it open.
Amy says, “You missed your lunch.”
“I lost track of the time.”
“You could eat now; you seem to have the room in hand.”
“If you’re sure,” Grace says, standing.
She takes her paper bag with her peanut butter sandwich to the kitchen at the back of the building. When she enters, she can see that Dr. Lighthart is asleep at a table in a darkened corner, his head on top of his arms. She steps outside the kitchen to unwrap the waxed paper so that she won’t wake him. She doesn’t dare pour herself a glass of water.
Already the sun is lowering, setting the tall barren trees outside the window alight with an orange color she has loved all her life. She checks her watch. Three-fifteen. She has no idea when she should leave. A six o’clock bus will take her back to the coast road.
Though she has been as silent as possible, Dr. Lighthart slowly lifts his head, stretches, and stands. It’s only then that he notices her by the window. Grace moves toward the sink to pour herself a glass of water.
“Amy says you’re a lifesaver.”
“She exaggerates.”
“Amy? Never. Comes from an old Yankee family.”
“Do you want me to work here on a permanent basis?”
“Yes,” the doctor says.
She doesn’t dare ask about a salary. “My hours would be…?”
“Let’s try for nine to five, though it might go over a bit.”
“My bus leaves at six.”
“Leave in ample time to catch it. I paid Barbara thirty-five dollars a week. Will that suit for now? We can always revisit the subject.”
“That will be just fine,” she says.
His dark eyes fix on hers. “Did your husband return?”
“He hasn’t come back.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says.
On her way home from her fourth day of work, Grace falls asleep on the bus and has to be woken by the driver. When she drags herself up the hill and into the house, her mother and children are in the kitchen with dinner on the table. They look at her as if they might not recognize her. Claire comes around the table and hugs Grace’s knees.
“What happened?” her mother asks.
“Nothing. The hours have caught up with me. It’s a long day, eight to seven.”
“I gave Claire a snack at four today so that she could hold out for dinner, but I’m keeping Tom on his regular schedule.”
Grace nods and sits in her chair without removing her coat.
“Which means,” says her mother, “that he has to go to bed in half an hour.”
“I’m so grateful,” Grace manages before she starts to cry.
“Now, now. Let’s just get some food into that scrawny body.”
Grace puts the files in the oak cabinet in order. Often she’s interrupted by patients, some of whom understand their symptoms, while others just admit to feeling lousy. Occasionally, a woman will enter with a fairly accurate diagnosis, which she recites in great detail. These are the women who have had experience nursing family members, Grace guesses. She makes notes, sometimes resorting to an agreed-upon shorthand of five phrases that both Amy and Dr. Lighthart understand. Almost always, Grace can locate the proper file. She attaches her notes to the first page inside the file, and hands it to Amy when she comes to the door.
“We’re going to need more files,” Grace tells the nurse.
“There’s a fund for petty cash in Dr. Lighthart’s office. You can get what you need there.”