Chapter 7: Kitchen Table

I read the comments for three days.

Poor thing. She needs help.

He's handling this with so much grace.

On the third night Gina took my phone out of my hand.

She wrapped it in a dish towel and put it in the freezer next to the frozen peas.

"You can have it back when you've eaten a vegetable," she said.

"Peas are a vegetable."

"Not those peas. Those peas have been in your shirt."

Her son looked up from his homework at the kitchen table.

"Why were peas in her shirt?"

"Grown-up stuff. Do your subtraction."

The protection order hearing was in three weeks. Until then I wasn't allowed within five hundred feet of Holden, his house or his office.

He'd made me a woman with a restraining order in one afternoon.

It had taken him a week to unfreeze my card for a box of tampons once.

Somebody knocked on the door.

Gina's neighbor from across the hall was standing there.

She was a heavy woman in her forties in a grocery store polo, with her name tag still on.

She was holding a stack of envelopes against her chest.

"Gina, I'm so sorry, I know you've got company."

"Hey. What happened?"

"I can't. I just. I can't read these. I keep trying, and the numbers swim."

Gina looked at me over her shoulder.

I was already getting up off the couch.

We sat her at the kitchen table.

Gina's son moved his homework over to make room and pushed his juice box at her without being asked.

She opened the top envelope.

Fourteen thousand two hundred dollars.

"Kidney stone," she said. "In April. I thought I was dying. I sat in the ER for five hours and they gave me a scan and some pills and sent me home."

"Was there a trauma team?" I said.

"A what?"

"Did a bunch of people run in and cut your clothes off?"

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Let Our Baby Die Over a Hospital Bill from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.