The Abandoned Wife novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Pell County

"That's Dr. Eckstein," I told the young man with the recorder. "He kept me alive."

"Is he also your boyfriend?"

"Ask him."

Emil looked at the recorder, then at me, and the corner of his mouth went up.

"Ask my mother," he said, and steered me through the crowd to the stairs.

Two weeks later, Amity, Indiana, had one traffic light and it was green.

The diner next to the clinic smelled of coffee and fried onions.

It smelled exactly as it had the day I first rolled in on a borrowed wheelchair.

Emil's mother stood behind the counter in a pink apron.

She was a small hard woman with his black eyebrows and none of his patience.

"You're eating," she said, and put a plate of pie in front of me.

"I had breakfast."

"You had a bagel, and a bagel is not food."

"Mom," said Emil.

"Don't Mom me.

She's the first one you've brought through that door who didn't need a prescription."

She pointed a fork at him.

"Sit down."

A man at the end of the counter set down his coffee and applauded once.

I laughed, the real one that cracks in the middle.

Across the street, in front of Pell County Memorial, a crowd had gathered on the lawn.

The new trauma bay was not built yet.

It was a rectangle of staked string, a gold shovel and a banner.

The first check, for three hundred thousand dollars, came from the sale of Tom's boat.

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