“I’m a year younger.”
“But you know me.”
“The name,” he said.
“Right. The name.”
“And...” I could tell he was debating whether or not to say it. “Your family.”
“Of course. My family.”
But some families grew or cooked worse: poppies, meth. Some traded in pills. Some drove back and forth to Chillicothe with balloons of heroin, bottles of painkillers. A lot of families got caught. Some were in jail, or died, or were killed. Lobo and Mama at least had been careful.
I looked at the man from the woods again. His back rested against the window, though rested was the wrong word. He sat rigid—and not just from pain. He was poised to jump if I did something (what?), ready to flinch, roll, or run. I wouldn’t have been surprised if his hand was on the door handle.
He would be disappointed to find out I had locked it.
My eyes flicked back to the road. I kept my voice cool. “Did you want to buy something? Is that why you were in my woods?”
“Buy something?”
“Weed?”
“No! I don’t do that.” He paused. “Do you?”
I could feel him looking at me, gray and intense.
“You must not remember me well,” I said.
* * *
The parking lot at the clinic was full. I dropped Grayson off at the emergency entrance and parked down by the river. When I returned to the clinic, I found Grayson slumped in the very last chair. I crouched down beside him.
He seemed surprised to see me. “You don’t have to stay.”
“Do you have folks coming?”
He made some kind of sound.
“I’ll stay. Nobody’s waiting at home for me, either.”
The waiting room overflowed. People sat in wheelchairs. A baby cried. Maybe more than one baby. There were several people with ice packs or bandages, several more coughing, but most just looked pale and miserable, red eyes and thin shoulders.
“People don’t want to go home,” a nurse said, pausing beside us, ice pack in her hand. “They don’t have heat there.” She bent the ice pack, releasing the chemicals with a crack, and handed it to Grayson. I thought of graduation: Lisbeth’s mama and her hand warmers. It seemed like years ago.
Someone moaned in a corner by the gift shop, and the nurse headed off to see to them.
“You want to tell me what you were doing in my woods?” I asked Grayson.
“I didn’t know it was your woods.”
“I didn’t see a car. How did you get all the way out there?”
Grayson folded the ice pack over his foot. He had taken his boot off, and in the harsh, yellow light of the clinic waiting room he looked younger. The beard scruff on his face could have been new. No lines spread around his eyes. “I got a ride from some guys at the restaurant. I ran out of firewood and wanted to go somewhere nobody would notice if I took a little. The guys dropped me off and I hiked into the woods. I thought, if somebody lived in those woods, they wouldn’t mind.”
“Stores sell firewood, you know.”
“They used to.” Grayson adjusted his ice pack. “When was the last time you were at Walmart?”
“My idea of hell,” I said.
“Well, the space heaters are gone now. They sold out weeks ago. Back-ordered, I guess. There’s a run on sleeping bags, blankets. Grow lights.”
“Grow lights?”
“Things are getting bad,” Grayson said. “You might not know because you’re out there on your farm.”
It was true. I could go for a week without going into town, maybe longer. I could make the groceries stretch. It was a thirty-minute drive into town in good weather, and I had made the trip less and less since I had been by myself. I wasn’t sure what stopped me. Snow or ice. Worrying about the roads. I waited until too late to set out. The sun sank earlier and earlier in the afternoons, and I didn’t want to be driving much after dusk, coming back alone to a house both empty and dark.
I think I also didn’t go because I didn’t want people feeling sorry for me. It was a small town. And small towns talk. Some people knew my family had left. The men at the feed store were already throwing in bags of fertilizer for free, offering to carry stuff out to my car, help me load. They weren’t hitting on me. Men who had known me longer than a heartbeat, or who were familiar with Lobo’s temper, had stopped trying stuff with me a long time ago. It was pity I saw in their eyes now.
In the waiting room, I looked around at the wheelchairs, the old women in shawls. A child couldn’t stop trembling. Being isolated on the farm, I had cut myself off from a lot. My puffy coveralls felt almost too hot in the waiting room. I wore comfortable boots that fit. I was warm and fed. Fine.
Grayson was talking on and on. “Canned goods are going. Nonperishables. Propane.”
I pulled out my phone, but didn’t dial the number. Lobo’s number. My mama didn’t have her own phone. Too expensive, he said. If I called, he would answer. He would want to know why I was calling, what had I done wrong. I shoved the phone back in my pocket. “After you’re done here?” I said to Grayson. “We’re going to Walmart.”
* * *
Seeing a doctor took all morning. When she finally came into the room where we had been placed—a storage closet, based on the mops and brooms and rolls of brown paper towels crowded in around us—her eyes looked scared. I sat on an upside-down bucket because there was only one chair and I let Grayson have it.
The doctor didn’t ask our names. She didn’t introduce herself. She didn’t even ask how it happened. She had a large brace ready in her hands. She unwrapped it and strapped it around Grayson’s foot.
“This is a walking cast,” she explained, tightening the straps. “You’ll need it.”
Grayson looked at me, then back at the doctor. “What does that mean?”
“That means, in an ideal world, you’d rest for a few weeks. You’d stay off your foot as much as possible. You wouldn’t walk. I’d give you crutches. You’d give your bone time to heal. But we don’t live in an ideal world,” she said. “I don’t want you to be left behind.”
“Left behind?” he echoed.
And that was it. She was leaving. She had spent five minutes with us, barely. The clinic had not even taken X-rays, not that I thought Grayson could have afforded them. I had been parking when he had filled out his paperwork, but from the sick gray tone his skin was taking on, the way he had kept asking me, Is it broken? Do you think it’s broken?—like I knew—paying for this visit was going to be a problem.