The Spare They Came Begging For novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: Recruiting

"Nine weeks to do what?" I asked.

"To make my program too big to swallow." Conor leaned on the railing. "They vote before the state review because they don't want anybody to see our numbers first. So we change the numbers before they vote."

"With what?"

"A chain. A real one, on the calendar, with names on it." He rubbed his jaw. "I've got one pair. Your bus guy's sister. I need four."

"Where do pairs come from?"

"Usually? Years of paperwork and luck." He looked at me. "But I've got a theory."

His theory was the dialysis unit on Saturday nights.

"Half the people in those chairs had somebody offer once," he said. "Wrong blood type. Wrong antibodies. Somebody told them no, and they went home and never asked again. Nobody ever told them about chains. Nobody had time."

"So we tell them."

"So we sit in the chairs and tell them."

Moira came the first Saturday because she said I'd be too polite.

She brought the kid, a bag of clementines and her own folding chair.

Harbor's dialysis unit was on the second floor, twenty chairs in a long room that hummed.

Every chair had a person in it, and every person had two tubes running from an arm into a machine the size of a refrigerator.

Four hours. Three nights a week.

The bus driver was in chair eleven with a puzzle book.

His arm was healing pink where the infection had been.

"Gray," he said. "You came to visit me at my second job."

"I came to recruit."

"For what? The Marines?"

"Kidneys."

He put the puzzle book down.

"Then you start with chair four," he said, lowering his voice. "She teaches third grade. Lupus. Her husband tried to give her one in the spring and he wasn't a match. She cried in that chair for a month."

The teacher was forty-four, with a cardigan full of cat hair and a stack of spelling tests on her lap.

Her husband was sitting beside her doing the grading with a red pen.

He was a big quiet man in a Patriots hat who looked at his wife.

Conor crouched down beside the chair so they were eye level.

He explained it the way he'd explained it to me on the steps at Commonwealth.

A stranger gives to you. Your husband gives to the next stranger. Then the next.

The husband put down his red pen.

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