Chapter 1
Junie
Dr. Okafor handed me one file on my first morning and said, "Good luck," in a tone I did not care for.
There were four beds in the Copper Ridge clinic.
Four. I counted them twice on the walk-through, because I've worked contracts where the supply closet was bigger than this whole building, and I kept expecting a door to open onto more clinic.
There wasn't more clinic. There was a waiting room with six chairs and a fish tank containing one extremely committed goldfish, an exam room, a second exam room that was mostly storage, and the four beds behind a curtain track that squealed.
"You've got the whole roster," Okafor said. He's sixty-one and built like a heron and he has the specific weariness of a man who has been trying to retire out loud for nine years. "Everything's in the system. It's a bad system. You'll adjust."
"And this one?" I said, because he was still holding the file. Holding it, not handing it. There's a difference and I noticed it.
"This one's not in the system." He put it in my hands. It was four inches thick and it made a sound when it landed. "Beckett Rhodes. Motorcycle versus geography, April. Femur, rod, four screws. Discharged to outpatient PT in July."
"Okay."
"He has attended none of it."
I opened the file. Nine appointment slips, nine no-shows, each one stamped and initialed by somebody with handwriting that had gotten angrier over time.
"Nine," I said.
"Nine."
"Does he know he has a leg?"
Okafor made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh.
"He knows. That's rather the problem." He took his glasses off and cleaned them on his coat, which I would learn is what he does instead of saying the hard part.
"He's Sergeant-at-Arms with the Kings. Big man.
Not a mean one — I want to be clear, he's never once been rude to me, which is somehow worse. He just doesn't answer the door."
"So we send somebody who doesn't leave."
He put his glasses back on and looked at me properly for the first time.
"You're what, twenty-four?"
"Twenty-seven. And I've done fourteen contracts, and eleven of them had a Beckett Rhodes." I closed the file. "They're all the same man. I'll go after lunch."
Here's the thing about being five foot one.
People decide about you in the doorway. Every single time, before I've said a word, there's a half second where a patient's face does the arithmetic and lands on this is not who I was expecting, and depending on the man it goes one of two ways: he gets protective, or he gets dismissive.
Both of those are just doors. You walk through either one.
What nobody plans for is that I have absolutely nowhere else to be.
Tank Rhodes's house sits on the north edge of town where the pavement gives up and turns to grade.
Low, long, brown, tin roof, a porch running the whole front of it with two chairs on it and a coffee can of sand for cigarettes that hadn't been used in a while.
There was a bike under a cover in the carport, and the cover had dust on it, and the dust had a stripe in it where somebody had put a hand on the seat and taken it off again.
I knocked at 1:40.
Nothing.
I knocked again at 1:43, and said, loudly and pleasantly, "Mr. Rhodes, it's Junie Alvarez from the clinic," and I heard — very clearly — a floorboard.
"Great," I said, to the door. "So we both know."
Nothing.
So I sat down on the porch step.
I want to be clear that this wasn't a tactic I invented in the moment.
This is a documented procedure of mine. I put my bag down, took out my laptop, put the hot spot on, and did my charting.
I had thirty-one notes to close from a contract in Winnemucca that the system wouldn't let go of.
I sat on that step in the good October light with my back against the post and I worked.
At 2:15 the floorboard again.
At 2:40 the front curtain moved about an inch and stopped, which I found genuinely funny and did not react to, because the fastest way to lose is to let a man know you've seen him.
At 3:05 a truck slowed on the road, and a woman with gray at the temples looked at me for a good four seconds and drove on, and I thought, well, that's the town notified.
At 3:20 I ate a granola bar.
At 3:38 the door opened.
He filled it. That's not a figure of speech — he had to come through it at an angle.
Six-four, maybe six-five, gray coming in at the sides, forearms like bridge cable, and a face that had clearly been handsome before it decided that was too much bother.
He was holding the door frame with his left hand in a way he probably thought was casual.
He looked down at me. Way down.
"You've been out here two hours."
"Two hours and eight minutes," I said, still typing. "You've got good light out here in the afternoon. It's a nice porch."
"I'm not doing PT."
"Okay."
That got him. I watched it land. He'd built up a whole speech behind that door — I could see the shape of it in his shoulders — and I'd taken the wall out from under it.
"...Okay?"
"You're an adult. I can't make you do anything.
" I saved the note, closed the laptop, and stood up, which put the top of my head at roughly the middle of his sternum.
"I came out to tell you two things and then I'll get out of your afternoon.
One: you're loading everything onto the right side.
I watched you open the door. Your right hip is taking a load it was not designed to take, and at the rate you're going you'll have a labral tear inside a year, and that one they can't rod.
That's a joint, not a bone. Different conversation entirely. "
His jaw moved.
"Two," I said, "you've been doing your own version of PT since July, haven't you. Alone. Nights, probably, so nobody sees."
He didn't answer. Which is an answer.
"Thought so. You'd be in a chair otherwise. So you're not lazy and you're not scared, you're just doing it wrong, and doing it wrong for four more months is going to cost you the hip." I got my bag onto my shoulder. "That's it. That's the whole visit. Would you like the hip or not?"
He looked at me for a long moment. Something behind his face was rearranging furniture.
"Nobody's put it like that," he said.
"Everybody's been trying to encourage you. I don't know you well enough to encourage you." I stepped down onto the gravel. "I'll be back Thursday at one. You don't have to open the door. I have a lot of charting."
I got about six feet.
"Alvarez."
I turned.
He was still in the doorway, one hand on the frame, and he'd gone somewhere behind his eyes and come back holding something he clearly didn't like the weight of.
"Coffee's on," he said. "It's bad."
"I'm not here for the coffee."
"I know." He moved out of the door. Two feet, no more, but he made a gap. "Come in anyway."
And that's how I got inside — walking past a man who was still telling himself he'd won.