Seven Men Called Me Her Stand-In, So I Made Them Pay novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: House Call

The surgeon examines Janet and offers to operate, and when he asks for her full name for the chart his pen stops.

"How did you find this house?" I asked.

The surgeon shifted his bag to the other hand.

"Anthony called me at one this morning. He gave me the town and the street, and said your mother's heart needed someone who wouldn't wait."

"Anthony doesn't know the street."

"He did at one this morning."

I stood in the doorway and did not let him in.

Behind me my mother said, "Who is it, June?"

"A doctor," said the surgeon. "A heart surgeon, ma'am. I only want to listen."

My mother came down the hall with one hand on the wall.

She stopped three feet from him and looked at his face.

I watched her do it.

Janet Lind had served that young man his breakfast on a silver tray for six summers in a row.

"Do I know you, young man?" she said.

"I don't think so, ma'am," the surgeon said.

"No," said my mother. "You wouldn't."

She turned and went back into the kitchen, and I let him in.

He listened to her chest at the empty table with his eyes on the wall.

He moved the stethoscope twice and counted under his breath.

He pressed two fingers against her ankle and watched the dent stay.

When he was finished he sat back, and the chair creaked.

"How long has she had the breathlessness?" he asked me.

"Since spring."

"She can't walk the stairs."

"She walks them," my mother said. "I just take my time."

"Ma'am, the valve is nearly closed. I'd say you have days, not weeks. If it fails, there won't be time to drive to Portland."

"I know what it is," Janet said. "A doctor told me in May."

"Did he tell you how to pay for it?"

"He told me to find someone who could," she said, and looked at me.

The surgeon looked at me too.

There was a pause I would have filled on any other day.

"I can do it at my hospital in Boston," he said. "Monday. I'll carry the cost of the surgeon's side. The rest is the hospital's, and I know who to call."

"No," I said.

"June."

"You don't owe me anything. You gave me your money last night and called me a cheap print. We're done."

He took that without flinching.

"I'm not doing it for you," he said. "I'm doing it because she's sick. Please let me."

"We'll say yes," my mother said.

"Mom."

"I said we'll say yes, June. I'm too old to be proud over a valve."

I could not argue with that, and for once she knew it.

The surgeon took a tablet out of his bag and set it on the table.

"I need her information for the transfer," he said. "Name, date of birth, and next of kin. It takes two minutes."

He had a pen for the stylus.

He held it over the screen and looked at my mother.

"Full name, ma'am?"

"Janet Lind," my mother said.

The pen stopped.

He did not look up right away.

I watched the back of his hand on the table, and the pen, and the corner of the screen.

Lind.

I had been Lind for twenty-one years, until I turned it into Averill at a county courthouse in a borrowed blazer.

I had left that name in a Connecticut courtroom at nineteen and had not said it aloud to a man since.

He looked at my mother's face, really looked, for the first time in his life.

Then he looked at me, and I held very still.

He had known me for fourteen months.

He had touched my hair once, on a rainy night in March, and then taken his hand away.

The pen lifted off the screen, and I thought: this is where it ends.

He bent his head and began to write.

Slowly, in clear block letters, he wrote: JANET AVERILL.

Then he said, in a voice so normal it hurt, "Date of birth, ma'am?"

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