“Honey, he’s just gonna turn you in to the cops now and find somebody younger to raise those kids,” Harlan says. “And you know it.”
The woman is shaking now, her bloodstained nails digging into the cement floor, or trying to. Chelsea can see every line of anguish in her body, knows what this feels like. This woman’s brain is going a mile a minute, trying to find some way through, trying to make everything okay, and every tally she makes comes up short.
There’s no good answer.
Harlan is right—she should leave, join the VFR—but it takes a certain kind of person to walk away from a bad situation that’s grown comfortable in its constancy.
The woman sits up, and Harlan puts out a hand to help her, but she ignores it and stands on her own, wobbly as the fawn Chelsea once felt like. She can’t meet anyone’s eyes, this broken woman, but she wraps her arms around herself and checks her pockets, finding keys and a duct tape wallet. Her eyes rove over the floors and land on a tiny plastic bag flecked with black, and Chelsea goes to get it, seals it, and holds it out.
“Thank you,” the woman says, taking the pepper. “It’ll be okay.”
She walks away in her flip-flops, head hanging. Harlan, Pauley, Steve, Chris, and Arlene all watch her go.
“It’s not going to be okay for her,” Chelsea says.
Harlan’s big bear paw lands on her shoulder.
“No, but she’s the only one who gets to make that decision. We tried. That’s the best we can do.”
The lights go on, bathing the big hall in buzzing fluorescents. The stands are empty now. The crowd has bolted. The posters are on the ground, the chairs are tipped over, drinks are spilled in sticky puddles. All that excitement, all that energy ran right out the door.
Chelsea heaves a sigh and looks at Harlan.
“So are we fucked now?” she asks.
He rubs his stubble and stares at the door the woman walked out of.
“Maybe” is all he says.
40.
Patricia has never been to an urgent care center before. She had to take Chelsea to the emergency room once when she nearly sliced off her thumb cutting an apple, but that at least felt serious and like an actual emergency. The child was gushing blood like a waterfall. Her own wounds seem less troublesome now that they’ve stopped bleeding, but she’s done enough online searches by this time to understand how serious her situation really is. In a different world, she would go to the ER, but it’s half an hour away and has a three-hour wait time. Urgent care should be able to take care of her—and it might also be less picky about payment. Plus, it’s only two miles away, and the posted wait time is seventeen minutes.
She’d imagined it would be like a regular doctor’s office, pleasant and balmy with fake palm trees in the corners and tidy spinning racks full of magazines and ads for fancy vitamins and male catheters, the same ads she sees if she tries to watch TV in the middle of the day in Florida. But the reality is that someone in charge of the urgent care center understands that people have to come here no matter what, and therefore they long ago stopped trying to make it pleasant.
It’s a sty.
First of all, it’s in the corner of the parking lot of a long-abandoned Kmart, and just a few parking spaces away is a place where people have decided they can dump their couches and old TVs. The concrete is cracked and broken, but that’s common in Florida. The hypodermic needle she has to step over is less common and the first sign that this experience is going to be worse than imagined. Inside, the floor is a murky, unwashed gray, the chairs faded and cracked after too much time in the sun. The people sitting in the chairs look hollowed out and desperate, except for the larger gentleman coughing so heavily and wetly that Patricia would rather sit next to a junkie than catch whatever he has. Ever since Covid, coughing in public without a mask is considered a major faux pas, but this man must’ve missed that particular piece of information.
At the front counter, she writes her name on the clipboard and stands expectantly. An exhausted-looking Black woman in her thirties glares up from her phone. Her scrubs have a child’s cartoon character on them, some square-shaped thing dancing across her bosom. “Have a seat. We’ll call you.”
Patricia puts on her Benevolent Rich Woman face. “It’s a bit of an emergency.”
The woman raises an eyebrow. “Yeah, that’s why they call it urgent care. Have a seat. Please.”
Patricia doesn’t like the tone, but she sits. There’s a TV high up, too high for anyone to attempt to lower the excruciating volume or change the very annoying channel. Two twin men who look like sex robots are convincing someone to buy a beach house that’s way out of the stated price range. Everyone else in the room is riveted. Patricia is bored. She flicks through her phone, but everything she sees gets on her nerves. She considers picking up one of the few magazines on a corner table, but they’re months out of date and look like they’ve been colonized by a skin disease.
“Ms. Lane?” the woman at the desk finally calls, eleven minutes later.
Patricia walks up there, smiling. “I’m Patricia Lane.”
“Please fill this out. When you bring it up, I’ll make a copy of your insurance card and collect your copay.”
The clipboard is translucent plastic with visible smears of God only knows what. Patricia takes it and a pen with a ragged fabric flower taped to it and goes to sit down. She hasn’t filled one of these out in years—not since she married Randall. She mainly sees Dr. Baird, and anytime she needs a referral, he gets her right in immediately with someone he trusts and has his secretary transfer all her records. Now Patricia has to try to remember her medical history and list all her prescriptions and dig out her insurance card, which probably won’t even work. Ah, well. She’ll cross that bridge when it gets in her way.
When she returns her clipboard, she hands over her insurance card, too. The woman rolls her chair over to a printer and Patricia waits there, unsure of what to do. She hates this sort of moment, when there isn’t a script for what should occur. The woman pretends she doesn’t exist as she makes copies, writes things down illegibly, and taps at her keyboard with irrationally long nails.
“Is this your only insurance?” the woman asks, squinting.
Patricia smiles. One of the first tricks she learned once she was out in the world on her own was that confidence and a smile could get a pretty woman through most things. “Of course.”
“It’s not pulling up, but the system has been up and down all day. I’m not sure what your copay is yet. We can do that after you see the doctor. You’re up next.”
“Thank you so much. I really do appreciate it.”
At that, the woman smiles, as if she hasn’t been thanked in years.
“It’ll just be a few.”
Patricia doesn’t even wince at the terrible grammar. A few what? She just smiles and sits back down, scrolling through news sites and hoping for giant ice storms in Iceland.