Chapter 24: Maureen Tolbert, RN

The nurse manager read my face and put a hand on the clipboard.

"I can give you another patient," she said quietly. "Nobody would blame you."

"I know."

"Do you want her?"

I looked at the woman in the bed.

She was awake, and she had seen me.

"I'll take her," I said.

I washed my hands at the sink by the door, for the full twenty seconds, and I went in.

"Good morning, Mrs. Ainsley. I'm Maureen Tolbert, and I'm your nurse today."

Rosalind turned her face to the window.

"I'd like someone else."

"I understand. You can ask for someone else, and the charge nurse will arrange it."

She said nothing.

"Or I can take your blood pressure," I said.

A long breath went out of her.

"Take it," she said.

I wrapped the cuff around her thin arm and let the air out slowly, two points at a time.

I heard the first knock of blood through the stethoscope, small and steady.

"A hundred and thirty-eight over eighty," I said. "Any pain right now?"

"A little. Here."

She touched her sternum with two fingers.

"On a scale of one to ten?"

"Four."

I wrote it down.

I checked her pulse, her oxygen and her chart, and I explained each thing before I did it.

I told her what the doctor had ordered, and what each tablet was for.

Rosalind watched my hands the whole time.

At the end of an hour she said, to the ceiling, "Curtis doesn't know I'm here."

"Would you like me to call him?"

"No."

"Is there someone I should call?"

"My sister is in Racine. She doesn't drive at night."

"I'll ask the social worker to phone her."

"You don't have to be kind to me."

"I'm not being kind," I said. "I'm being thorough. It's different."

Her mouth moved, and for a moment I thought she was going to cry.

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