She framed it.
Gilbert was charged in January, and in March he pleaded guilty to a felony and agreed to repay every dollar of his incentive pay.
Bethany Stroud sent me a short note on cream paper.
I didn’t know. That is not an excuse.
She had moved to her sister’s in Nashville.
I wrote back one line.
Thank you for stepping over the ribbon.
I never heard from her again, and I think that is as it should be.
Some things changed overnight, and some changed slowly.
The hospital wrote a new policy, and it was one sentence long.
Every financial assistance approval would be sent to the patient on the day it was made, signed by the committee chair, with a copy to the front desk.
Lillian taped a copy of it above my terminal.
She also, over my loud objections, asked the board to create a position called Patient Advocate.
I said I’d take it if I could keep the desk.
So I kept the desk.
There is a glass jar on it now, full of peppermints.
Nobody has ever asked me why.
Kaylee came home from the hospital on the eleventh of November, with two carriers in the back seat and a car seat in the middle for Maisie.
Virgil drove them out Fairlane Road in his own pickup, because he wouldn’t let anyone else.
He told me later that he’d driven that road at forty miles an hour, with both hands on the wheel, thinking about a wheelbarrow.
Four miles.
A six-year-old.
The squeak of the wheel the whole way, and nobody in the road.
It still gets him.
He and I had coffee in that cafeteria the Friday after, and the Friday after that.
It’s a terrible cafeteria.
In January, he asked me to dinner at the diner on Route 9, and I said yes, and then I said, « I’m not in any hurry, Virgil. I haven’t been in one for a while. »
« Neither am I, » he said.
He held my coat.
We have been to the diner eleven times since.
Last week, he parked the ambulance outside my house at the end of his shift, and we sat in the front seat with the engine ticking, and he took my hand.
I have thought a great deal, since that Thursday, about how much of a life can hide behind a front desk.
