Chapter 8: Friday Night

Maura had Rosalind in a chair before I finished crossing the room.

She knelt, took Rosalind's wrist and watched the clock on the wall.

"Dizzy? Cramping?"

"A little dizzy," Rosalind whispered. "No cramps."

"She's fine," Maura said to me, flat and professional. "Blood pressure's down. She needs water, and her doctor needs to see her today."

I called the ambulance myself.

While we waited, Brooks walked to the stairwell door, said he needed air, and did not come back.

Nobody went after him.

The paramedics took Rosalind out on a gurney.

I walked beside her as far as the elevator.

She turned her head on the pillow and said, "Damon."

I said nothing.

It was the kindest thing I had left.

In the lobby my mother squeezed my arm.

She put the cashier's check and her note into her handbag.

She told me she would ride home with the guard's son, who had a truck.

"Go with the nurse," she said. "Don't call me until Sunday."

"Mom."

"I'm sixty-three. I know what Sunday is for."

Maura's apartment was over a laundromat in Dayton, up a flight of outside stairs.

It was after nine when she unlocked the door.

The whole place smelled of warm dryer sheets, and the windows hummed from the machines below.

She dropped her laptop bag on a kitchen chair and stood with her back to me and her hand on the counter.

"I've told myself for three years that I wouldn't," she said.

"You told me Friday."

"It's Friday."

"It's Friday night," I said. "I ticked a box at eight forty this morning."

She turned around.

"I'm not your patient," I said. "I haven't been your patient for eleven months. You know that better than anyone."

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Wife Sent Me to a Psych Ward, So I Gave Her a Big Surprise from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.