Troublemakers Mess With the Wrong Girls novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: Nothing Wrong With Her

The ambulance took Grandma to St. Joseph's, and my mother was working the desk when she came in.

I know because Mom's night shift had run long, and she was still standing at the nurses' station in her scrubs when the doors opened.

Dennis rode in beside the gurney, crying. Dad had come straight from the garage with oil on his sleeves.

I followed in my own car with a tray of lemon bars still on the passenger seat, because I'd forgotten to take them out.

Grandma lay on the bed with an oxygen clip on her finger and her eyes shut.

"Her heart," Dennis said to everybody. "She was having a heart attack. Jo made her have a heart attack."

"Sir," the young doctor said, "step back, please."

Mom walked in without hurrying.

She looked at the monitor first. Then she lifted Grandma's wrist and held it for a count.

She looked at the chart on the clipboard at the foot of the bed.

"Hello, Bernadette," she said.

Grandma's eyelids did not move.

"Her heart rate is seventy-two," Mom said to the doctor. "Her pressure is one-thirty over eighty and her oxygen is ninety-eight on room air. The EKG came back clean while the paramedic was still holding the leads."

"Maureen, this is a family matter," Dennis said. "You can't be in here."

"I'm a nurse in this building. I've been in here for twenty-three years."

"She collapsed!"

"I saw you carry the chair she sat down on."

She said it quietly, and the young doctor looked at his shoes.

"Sometimes a person faints from stress," he offered. "It happens."

"It does," Mom said. "And then they wake up and eat the lemon bars."

Grandma's mouth went flat.

Her eyes opened.

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