He Ranked Her First, I Chose Myself novel · Chapter 15 of 24
Chapter 15: Rank Night
Fitz's lawyer read the lease three more times that week.
It said the same thing every time.
The price, the deadline and the bank did not move.
And a board that voted on the twentieth, with Judson's father in a chair.
Jodie got back from her honeymoon on a Tuesday.
By Wednesday she had a plan and a name for it.
"Rank Night," she said, standing on a stool in the back room with a marker.
"Absolutely not."
"We're taking it back, Doctor Mo. Saturday the first. Everybody you ever stitched, everybody who ever drank here, every nurse in that ED. Darts, raffle, a jar on the bar. We raise money to build the clinic out, so when that board says yes, it's ready."
"If they say yes."
"When," said Jodie's wife from the doorway. "She's already printed the shirts."
She had.
They were Mahaffey's green, and across the back, in white letters, they said WE KNOW WHERE SHE WAS.
On Saturday night the line went out the green door and down past the tire shop.
The welder worked the door with a cash box on a folding chair.
"Twenty bucks," he told everybody. "Ten if she stitched you. Free if you're my granddaughter."
His granddaughter came, and paid twenty anyway.
The two retired cops ran the darts.
Five dollars a throw, a hundred if you hit the bull.
Nobody hit the bull.
Nobody hit the board.
The night nurse came straight off shift in her scrubs and put two hundred dollars in the jar.
"That's for the motorcycle kid," she told me. "He sent the ED a fruit basket. All bananas."
Half my intern class showed up.
The buzz-cut prelim beat the cops at darts by hitting the wall closest to the board.
At ten o'clock, the ED attending walked in.
The room went quiet.
He looked around at the tin ceiling and the jar and the green shirts.
Then he walked to the bar, took out a checkbook and wrote a check without sitting down.
He handed it to Fitz folded in half.
"My cousin's pressure," he said. "Don't make a thing of it."
Fitz unfolded it.
His eyebrows went up, both of them, scar and all.
At eleven, Jodie climbed on the bar with a microphone she'd borrowed from a karaoke place.
"Okay! The pickled egg!"
Everybody groaned.
"Nobody has eaten a Mahaffey's pickled egg since 1994. Tonight one brave person changes history. Pledges are open."
The pledges hit four hundred dollars in two minutes.
The night nurse ate it.
She chewed slowly in total silence while a hundred people watched.
"It's fine," she said. "It tastes like a basement."
The room went wild.
At midnight Jodie went through the jar, the door box and the checks at the end of the bar with her wife and a calculator.
She checked the total twice.
Then she stood on the bar again.
"Thirty-one thousand dollars," she said.
Nobody said anything for a second.
Then the welder started the chant.
"All in! All in! All in!"
I didn't mind it.
It sounded different coming from him.
By one-thirty it was just the four of us and the empty glasses.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of He Ranked Her First, I Chose Myself are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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