Chapter 6: Saturday Clinic

The sewing circle met in the basement of a brick church on Fleet Avenue, and it had never owned a needle.

It owned eleven folding tables, a donated ultrasound and a refrigerator full of insulin pens.

It also had a retired nurse of seventy-three who ran the whole thing with a clipboard and a whistle.

I got there at nine on Saturday morning, straight from my shift, with no sleep and a granola bar in my pocket.

Forty people were already in line.

"You look terrible," the retired nurse told me.

"Thank you."

"Sit. Eat. You have a toddler with an ear."

I saw the toddler, and then an old man whose blood pressure was far too high.

Then I saw a woman who wanted to know if the lump in her breast was anything.

I told her I would not guess, wrote a referral and walked her to the phone to make the call herself.

Around ten, I looked up from a boy's swollen ankle and saw Bennett through the basement window.

He was parked at the curb in his gray sedan.

It was the same car that had dropped me at the church every Saturday morning for five years.

He had never once come inside.

He got out and opened the trunk.

By the time I finished the ankle, he had carried in six boxes of donated canned goods.

I hadn't asked him to, and he set them down at the end of the line.

"Where do these go?" he asked the retired nurse.

"Who's asking?"

"I'm... Joss's husband."

"Ex," I said from across the room.

"Ex-husband," Bennett said to the nurse. "I'm carrying boxes."

She looked him up and down.

"Back wall, by the freezer. Don't stack higher than your chin."

He carried boxes for an hour.

He didn't say a word to me and didn't ask for anything.

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