Chapter 9: On Her Own Two Feet

They discharged me on Wednesday through the loading dock.

Dale had arranged it with a night nurse who owed him for a transmission.

I rode in the back of his truck with a hoodie pulled over my face and a blanket over my knees.

My hand was taped in a splint from the IV, and my chest ached with every bump.

Mom's cousin lived forty minutes across the city, in a brick house with a long ramp.

She was seventy, widowed, and the kind of woman who did not ask questions twice.

She met us at the door with a casserole and a baseball bat.

"Nobody followed you?" she asked.

"No," Dale said.

"Good. Get her inside before the neighbors see."

She had made up the back bedroom with a quilt and a space heater.

There was a window that looked over a fenced yard and a bird feeder.

I sat on the edge of the bed, and I realized nobody on earth knew where I was except three people.

For the first time in eight years, nobody was coming to check my chart.

I let my shoulders drop for the first time in a week.

"Dale," I said. "Go home. Sleep."

He had a black eye from somewhere and two broken knuckles in a splint.

"I'll sleep when you're standing," he said.

"Then watch."

I put both hands on the mattress.

The walker stood in the corner, and the wheelchair was folded under the window with one bent footrest.

Elliot's boot had done that.

I looked at the walker and decided I did not want it.

"Annie, the PT said six weeks," Mom said from the door.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Goodbye to the Love I Lost Eight Years Ago from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.