Chapter 23: Frances Kemper Wing

St. Anne's opened the new wing on a gray Tuesday morning, with a ribbon and a brass plaque.

The plaque read *Frances Kemper Transplant Wing*.

I stood in the lobby in my funeral suit, which was the only good one I owned, and looked at my mother's name in metal.

Allison stood beside me in her dock-associate uniform.

She had asked to come in it.

"I don't want to wear anything she wouldn't recognize," she had said.

"My mother never saw you in a uniform."

"She saw me in my wedding dress. She said I looked like a woman who needed to eat."

"She said that?"

"She slipped me a roll under the table at the lunch."

I laughed, and it hurt, and it was good.

The hospital's director gave a speech, and the donors clapped.

Nobody mentioned that the largest gift had come from a cashier's wire, in a woman's name, at two in the afternoon.

Allison stood very still through the whole speech.

"It's the wrong name on the check," she said to me quietly, afterward.

"What do you mean?"

"It should be yours."

"It's my mother's."

"She didn't get to spend it."

"She got to spend it on a boy," I said. "He's down the hall."

He was.

When the director cut the ribbon, a pair of double doors opened at the end of the lobby.

The boy from room 512 came through them in a paper mask and blue pajamas, pushing his own IV pole, with his mother a step behind.

He walked all the way across the marble floor by himself.

The whole lobby stood and made noise.

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