8. Mutual Aid
Chapter eight
Mutual Aid
OWEN
The whole town knew about this date before I did.
That's the only explanation for the Willow Mug at noon on Sunday. Every booth full. Every head bent over pie nobody's eating. Hank Marlow hasn't turned a page of his sports section since I came through the door.
Nellie's already at the corner table when I walk in.
Of course she is. Fifteen minutes early, sitting where she can see the door, menu closed in front of her like she's done with it and me both.
She's out of scrubs. First time I've seen it. Jeans and some soft green thing, and every neutral remark I lined up in the truck goes out of my head at once. I knew. Under all that hospital cotton, I knew. Knowing didn't prepare me one bit.
I cross the diner, and my hand goes for the back of her chair. To pull it out for her. Like my mother taught me.
Like she isn't already in it.
The chair scoots an inch with Nellie still on it.
"I'm sitting," she says.
"I see that."
"You're still holding my chair."
I let go. "It's called manners."
"That's why I came early." She smiles at me over her water glass. It is not a nice smile. "Take a seat, Peterson. You're blocking Hank's view."
I sit. Somewhere behind me, a newspaper rustles.
June from the bakery is covering tables today, which means the service comes with commentary. She sets down two waters we already have. "Y'all look nice."
"We look like hostages," Nellie says. "Thank you, June."
June beams and does not leave.
"I'll have the chicken-fried steak," I say. "She'll take the—"
"She'll take nothing you order for her." Nellie hands up her menu without looking at me. "Club sandwich, no mayo, iced tea. And June? If he tries to pay for mine, arrest him."
June writes it all down like scripture and floats off to report to the kitchen, the counter, and probably the church phone tree.
Nellie folds her hands. "Four hundred and eighteen dollars."
"And car-wash coupons."
"And car-wash coupons. Debbie's very proud." She tilts her head. "So, this is the famous auction lunch. You gonna tell me about yourself, or do I have to read the bio Tater wrote? Because I have it memorized. 'Gently used. Runs good. Some cosmetic damage.'"
"He's a dead man."
"He's a poet."
Something in my chest unclenches half an inch. That's the problem with her. Right when I've got my guard set, she says a thing like that and my mouth wants to smile without clearing it with me first.
So naturally, I ruin it.
"Thirteen weeks," I say. "That's the contract?"
"That's the contract."
"Then what?"
"Then the next one. Montana, maybe. There's a hospital in Missoula that keeps calling."
"And after Montana?"
"After Montana, wherever's after Montana." She shrugs like it's nothing. Like it's weather. "That's the whole design, Peterson. It's a feature."
"So, you leave people."
Her glass stops halfway to her mouth.
I hear it a second after I say it. The shape of it. The weight. I meant it like a question and it came out like a charge, and the temperature at our table drops ten degrees.
"Excuse me?"
"I mean—" I don't know what I mean. "Patients. Coworkers. That Kessler fella lights up when you walk in. Debbie talks about you like family. And in seven weeks you're a forwarding address."
"Wow." She sets the glass down careful, and careful is worse than loud. "Three weeks of stitches and butterscotch surveillance and you've got me all diagnosed."
"I'm not diagnosing—"
"You want to talk about leaving?" Her voice stays low.
Pleasant, even. Anybody two booths over would think we're discussing the weather.
"Fine. Left at twenty-two, gone twelve years.
Didn't have to dig for that one, Peterson.
Debbie had it out before my second glass of wine, and Millie gave me the extended cut at the auction.
This whole town's got your file." She leans in.
"And now you're back five minutes, bossing my ER like a substitute teacher, because if Owen Peterson isn't personally in charge, the sky falls.
You can't order the whole world into being okay.
God knows you try. Who appointed you? Who asked? "
Direct hit. Somewhere below the waterline.
"You don't know one thing about why I left," I say.
"And you don't know one thing about why I do." She leans back. "Funny how that works."
June arrives with the food into a silence you could pour concrete in. She looks at Nellie. Looks at me. Sets the plates down like she's defusing something and backs away without a word, which for June is a medical event.
We eat. Or we move food around, the two of us performing lunch for a full house.
A woman works her way down from the register, eight months gone if she's a day, one hand riding under her belly. She turns sideways past our table.
My fork stops. Everything stops. Three seconds of gray static, and I'm not in the diner anymore. Then I am, and I put my eyes back on my plate and make my hand move.
Nellie's watching me. Cooler than before. She thinks I quit on this lunch somewhere between the tea and the silence.
I let her think it.
"This was Debbie's money," Nellie says finally. "The Dallas lady wanted you. I should've let her have you."
"You could've said no."
"To Debbie Sue?" She laughs. It's not the good laugh. "Sure. Right after I teach Millie to mind her own business. Four hundred dollars to sit in a diner and get character-assessed by a man wearing flannel in July. There's not enough money in Texas."
"It's a work shirt."
"It's ninety-five degrees, Peterson. Nobody's working." She points her straw at me. "And it's got a fold line down the front. Straight out of the package. You dressed up."
"That's how they come from the store."
"Sure it is." She picks up her iced tea. "You know what your problem is?"
"I've got a feeling I'm fixin' to hear it."
"Your problem is you think caring about people means controlling them. Amos's discharge plan. Your probies. Me, apparently, a woman you've known three weeks—"
"My problem?" And I'm leaning in now, voice dropping the way it does on a fireground, and I can't stop it.
"My problem is a know-it-all with a stethoscope who's got a smart answer for everything except one honest question.
Thirteen weeks and gone, over and over. That's not a feature, that's a fire escape. What are you running from, Greer?"
The tea leaves her glass before I register her arm moving.
It's cold. It's very cold, and there's a lot of it, and it is entirely in my lap.
The Willow Mug goes silent as a held breath. Hank's newspaper freezes mid-turn.
Nellie stands, chair scraping back, purse on her shoulder, cheeks blazing, and she's got her mouth open for the exit line—
Glass shatters outside.
Not diner glass. Street glass, followed by the crunch of metal folding wrong, and then a sound that overrides every other sound in the world.
A kid. Screaming.
I'm through the door before the bell finishes ringing. I don't remember standing up. I don't remember anything between the table and the sunlight. That's how it works when it's real. The body goes and the brain catches up.
Half a block down Main, a pickup sits stopped at the crosswalk and a sedan has climbed up its back bumper. Steam already curling off the sedan's crumpled hood. Driver's door hanging open, a woman stumbling out, both hands pressed to her mouth, and in the back seat—
The kid. Six, maybe seven. Screaming his lungs raw and holding his arm against his chest.
"Call 911," I shout at the sidewalk in general, and four phones come up. Small towns.
I reach the sedan. Fuel smell. Faint, not active. Airbag powder in the air like flour. The mom's saying his name over and over, Billie, Billie, baby, and reaching for him, and I catch her shoulder gentle.
"Ma'am. I'm a firefighter. Let me get to him."
"His arm—"
"I see it."
And then Nellie's on the other side of the car.
Didn't hear her follow. Didn't have to. Her door's open before mine, and she's folded down to the kid's eye level, and the voice coming out of her is one I've never heard. Low. Warm. Steady as a heartbeat.
"Hey, Billie. I'm Nellie. I'm a nurse, and that is a very loud car, huh? So loud. You're doing so good."
The screaming drops to sobbing. Just like that.
"Neck's clear," she says to me, different voice, flat and fast. "He's moving it fine. Belted, booster seat. It's the arm."
"Restraint's jammed." The buckle's bent where the seat frame shifted. "I got it."
"Left forearm, midshaft." She's got her hands moving over the kid light as sparrows, never touching the arm. "Deformity, no break in the skin. Billie, buddy, can you wiggle these fingers for me? Look at that. Good hand circulation, Peterson."
"Greenstick?"
"Greenstick," Nellie says. "See how it's bowed, not bent wrong? It cracked; it didn't snap."
The mom makes a sound.
"That's the good kind." Nellie's voice drops into something I haven't heard from her before. Soft. Sure. "Kid bones are green wood. He'll be swinging a bat by fall."
The mom sags. So does something in my chest.
She glances up. "I need it splinted before we move him or he'll fight us."
"I need something stiff. Menu, clipboard, anything."
I'm already moving. I come back with two laminated menus and a fistful of dish towels, and the waitress trailing me doesn't say a word about it.
"Perfect." Nellie pads the arm, sandwiches it between the menus. "Belt."
Mine's off before she finishes the word.
She doesn't look up. Doesn't have to. Her hands are steady and quick, and I hold what she tells me to hold, and somewhere in the middle of it I realize we haven't argued in four minutes. A personal record.
After that it's easy. It shouldn't be easy. I've run a hundred scenes with guys I trained with for years that didn't run this smooth.
She talks to Billie. I free the buckle. She calls for the splint and my hands are there with it before the sentence ends.
I brace, she wraps. She says "sling" and I've got my flannel off and folded before she looks up.
We move the kid out of the car in one slow piece, her taking the arm, me taking the weight, trading him between us like we've done it a thousand times, like we drilled this, like we're not two people who were flinging iced tea ten minutes ago.
The mom's crying easier now, the scared-relieved kind. Billie's down to hiccups, tucked against Nellie on the curb, inspecting his menu arm.
"It's got pancakes on it," he says.
"Sure does." Nellie tilts her head at it. "You hungry?"
He thinks about it the way kids do, with his whole face. "Kinda."
"That's a good sign, bud."
"And that's the temporary one. Wait till you see the real deal. They come in colors." Nellie tells him.
"Blue?"
"Kid, they come in blue like you wouldn't believe."
Sirens now, far off and closing. I settle onto the curb next to them because my legs decide it's time. The adrenaline's dumping out of me the way it does, leaving everything loose and bright, and I look over at her.
She's already looking at me.
Sweat's pulled her hair loose. There's airbag powder on her cheek and tea on my jeans and Billie between us going through her club sandwich, which she grabbed off the table on her way out the door, apparently, because of course she did.
"You grabbed the sandwich," I say.
"Somebody's blood sugar was going to matter." She hands Billie another quarter of it. "Turns out I was right."
"You're always right."
"I know. It's exhausting."
Neither of us looks away. The space between us over that kid's head is about eighteen inches and shrinking, and there's a pull in it I can feel in my sternum, right where the chain sits. Her eyes drop to my mouth for half a second. Half a second. I'd testify to it in court.
The ambulance rounds the corner with the siren winding down, and the moment breaks like the glass did.
Nellie's up, all business, giving report to the medics in clean clipped sentences.
Vitals, mechanism, distal pulse intact. They load Billie and his mom, and June's pressing iced tea on the medics, and Hank wants his belt back, and the little crowd starts folding itself back into the diner to spend the rest of the day telling it.
Then it's the two of us on Main Street. Sunday sun. Broken glass glittering in the gutter like somebody spilled stars.
"Well," she says. "That was—"
"Have dinner with me."
It comes out of me the same way going through that door did. No decision. No plan. My mouth just went.
She blinks. "We had lunch. It's still on your pants."
"A real one." My heart's going harder than it did at the wreck, which tells me something I'm not ready to hear. "No auction. No audience. No town." I nod up the street at the diner windows, where every face drops out of sight at once. "Dinner with me, Nellie."
She should say no. She's got a rule, I can see it sitting behind her eyes, I can watch her load it up.
"…I get off at seven."