Chapter 15: Ninety-Eight Over Sixty

"Then give them to me now," I said.

Rosalind shook her head.

"Not today. I'll hand them over on the day this is signed, when I know what's left for my son."

"Mother," Curtis said.

"I have kept those letters twenty-two years, Curtis. I can keep them one more month."

The mediator folded her hands.

"We'll adjourn," she said. "Mrs. Tolbert, can you return on the second Tuesday of February?"

"I'll be there," I said.

My lawyer took my elbow and steered me out before I said what I wanted to say.

On the first Monday of January, I stood in the doorway of a skills lab at ten minutes to eight, in navy scrubs that still had the fold lines in them.

The lab had eight hospital beds, each with a plastic patient in it, and a dozen students were arguing about the coffee machine.

Every one of them was about twenty-two.

I had a new badge on a clip, a binder, a stethoscope I had bought the day before, and the silver pin in my left pocket.

"Excuse me," a girl with a long braid said. "Are you the new instructor?"

"No," I said. "I'm a student."

"Oh." She looked at the stethoscope and then at my gray hair. "That's so cool. My mom said she always wanted to go back."

"Tell her it's very loud in here," I said.

She laughed, and so did I.

The instructor was a small, brisk man named by his badge as a clinical educator, and he divided us into pairs.

I got the girl with the braid.

"Today we take vital signs," he said. "Pulse, pressure, respirations, temperature. Pretend the manikin is your grandmother and she's frightened."

My partner pumped the cuff and got the needle to swing the wrong way.

"Let it down slowly," I said. "About two points a second."

"How do you know that?"

"I used to know it," I said. "I'm getting it back."

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Sat Me by the Warming Racks, So I Pulled the Funding from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.