Chapter 5: Forty at the Door

By Monday morning there were forty people on the porch.

They stood in the cold with their arms held out, and they would not look me in the eye.

One had a hand wrapped in a dishrag.

One was a woman with a limp so old that she had stopped noticing it.

A man held his bad shoulder with his good hand, and a teenage boy held up a burned wrist and pretended it did not hurt.

Word had gone around the mountain overnight.

I stood in the doorway in Dessie's dress with my coffee going cold.

He had not come back.

I told myself I did not care. I told myself twice.

"Don't you dare," Dessie said at my elbow. "Three a day. Then you eat, then you sleep, then three more."

"They're hurting."

"They've hurt for years. They'll hurt till Wednesday." She pointed her spoon at me. "I've watched you shake. You are not a pump, child."

I did the old man's hip first.

He sat on the porch swing, a stooped old wolf in a feed cap.

He had not shifted in a decade because it hurt too bad.

I put both hands over his hip. My palms heated.

The bone ground under them, then eased, and he began to cry without making a sound.

"Thank you," he said. "Thank you, miss."

He did not ask what I was owed.

Nobody in my life had ever not asked me what I owed.

I did two more that day.

Dessie put a bowl of beans in my hand after each.

She sat on the step and watched me eat every spoonful.

Keep reading free with an account. Start They Blamed Me for Mama's Death, So I Healed Their Worst Enemy from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.