“A nurse can help,” said the doctor.
“We won’t need a nurse,” Emma said quickly, before Roland could say it. But looking at him, she saw he was far from taking offense. It had been the same in the hospital: while Emma flinched at the facts, the clacking floors, the words themselves—crushed, amputate, stump, stump, stump, stump—Roland appeared to float in a distant, empty state. She thought it must be disbelief, but even here, in his own house, he seemed a punched-out version of his previous self, a balloon everyone had always feared would pop but that instead had quietly diminished. Maybe he was still in shock, and would return. Emma had often longed for Roland to be less irascible, but the reality of it, his peaceful bagginess, filled her with grief.
“If there’s any redness . . .”
It’s all red! Emma wanted to shout. How do I distinguish between one red and another? How am I supposed to know what I’m doing? She had managed well enough with Mr. Hirsch—she had bathed and inspected him, she had treated the spots gone sore from too much sitting, she had acted, despite her lack of experience, as his nurse. But she hadn’t known him when he’d been another way.
“We’ll keep a careful eye on it,” she told the doctor. “Thank you.”
Roland reached his arms out for Joshua. “Bring him here,” he said quietly.
“He wants a cookie,” Emma said.
“So bring him a cookie,” Roland said, his arms still out. Emma placed the boy in his lap and went. It was Roland’s rule that the Murphy children did not eat outside the kitchen. When they did, he shouted and swore as if they’d set the house on fire. Emma made the children follow the rule when Roland was home and when he wasn’t, to keep herself in the habit of enforcing it and to keep all of them in the habit of Roland. This summer, she had been especially strict about it, to compensate, she supposed, for her other, more significant rebellions. Walking out of the kitchen now with the cookie in her hand—its butter and sugar bought, like so much else, with funds from Josiah Story—she felt a mix of bewilderment and fear, as if Roland might turn on her at any moment and say, Got you!
“You know,” the doctor was saying, “in a few months, you might be able to fit a prosthetic. Once the stump is healed. It takes strength, but you’ve got that.”
“I’m not going to pretend I’ve got a leg,” Roland said quietly.
The doctor looked to Emma. “There’s time,” she said, handing the cookie to Joshua and a five-dollar bill to the doctor.
He waved the money away. “It’s the least I can do, Mrs. Murphy.”
“Please.”