Chapter 23: The Ward Opens

Rosemary's POV

Alec took his hand out of the other pocket, and there was nothing in it.

"I don't have a ring," he said. "I didn't want to buy one on the road, and I wasn't sure."

"You were sure."

"I was sure." He looked at his hand. "I'm asking you anyway."

"Ask."

"Not before the divorce goes through. When you're free, and you want to. Will you marry me, Rosemary?"

Behind me, through the open window, something heavy hit the flower bed.

We both turned.

My mother was standing in the roses with her shears at her feet and both hands over her mouth.

"Don't mind me," she said. "I'm pruning."

"Mom."

"Say yes, Rosemary Anne," my mother said, "before the man loses his nerve."

"Yes," I said, to him, and not to my mother.

He put his forehead down on my shoulder and laughed until the chair shook.

We flew home to the lake on Friday.

The ward opened eleven days later, on a Sunday, in a heat that made the new tin roof ring.

There were four hundred people in the yard.

Wanjiru had cut a red ribbon from somebody's best curtain and tied it across the ward door.

The village band that had once serenaded me at dawn played something hopeful and mostly in tune.

Alec made a speech that lasted two sentences.

"This roof does not leak," he said. "Please do not test it."

Wanjiru stood beside him in her pressed white uniform, and she took the scissors and handed them to me.

"You," she said.

"It's your clinic."

"It is your ward. The roof is Clayton's, but the ward belongs to the nurse."

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Left at 2 AM for Her Tampons, So I Left for Kenya from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.