The Stars Are Fire(47)

Noting the blue plate special, three courses for a quarter, Grace decides to order that and make each course last. She starts with a cup of tea, moves on to tomato-cheddar soup, picks at a bacon and lettuce sandwich, and has Grape-Nut pudding for dessert, followed by a cup of coffee, over which she lingers.


The jeweler has the money in a fat envelope. He counts it out for her in tens and twenties and the occasional fifty. He asks her if she would like to count it, too, but she responds that it won’t be necessary. She receives the envelope into her hands.


The worn leather handbag she borrowed from her mother (who in turn had borrowed it from Gladys) glows with the envelope of money inside. She holds the purse to her chest, afraid that someone might snatch it. When she gets home, she’ll put the envelope at the back of the closet in a hatbox and remove money only when absolutely necessary.

She’ll find a job. With her first paycheck, she’ll fill the pantry, buy clothes for the children, and pay the utility bills that have been accumulating in a basket in the kitchen. With her second, she’ll dip into the hatbox and buy a used car. She’ll say she bought it on time with her paycheck. She hopes her mother knows little about financing or the price of cars.


The following morning, Grace enters the doctor’s clinic to ask about work and finds a full waiting room with no one at the desk. She walks beyond the desk and into the corridor of rooms and discovers Amy in the first room, taking a child’s temperature, the mother eyeing her watch. Grace doesn’t want to intrude, but she remains a second longer. Amy turns to shake down the thermometer and nearly shouts, “Grace.”

Grace steps away from the door to wait for Amy to be free.

“Are you okay? What are you doing here?” Amy asks.

“I’ve come looking for work.”

“Barbara never came back; she fractured her hip and elbow.”

Grace asks where Dr. Lighthart is.

“He’s in the back.”

Grace waits. She sees Dr. Lighthart darting across the corridor, and several times Amy comes back with a patient, ignoring Grace.

“Hello,” Dr. Lighthart says, slightly out of breath. “I’ve often wondered about you. Amy told me you were here and wanted work.”

“I do.”

“How’s your daughter?”

“Fit and healthy, thank you.”

“Can you start now?”

“Yes,” she says, “I can.”

“The front desk is a mess. Do you think you could sort through the piles of paper and put them in order and label them so that I could take a quick look after work?”

“I will.”

“Good.”

He disappears as suddenly as he came. Grace finds Amy and asks if she knows the order of patients and who came in first. Amy shakes her head and replies, “If you can, practice some triage. If a person looks as though he or she is deathly ill, I’ll take those first. And any child with a high temperature.”

Grace swallows.


In the waiting room, Grace asks the crowd a simple question. “Do you know who got here first?” There’s a moment of silence, and a woman points across the room. “That man there.”

“Okay, I’m going to go around the room in the order you all think is first-come, first-serve. Just tell me your name and how you feel.”

In the next few minutes, Grace crisscrosses the room, writing down names and symptoms on the back of a telephone bill. With a frightening uncertainty, she develops her own triage, putting some names at the top of the list.

“Are you in labor?” she asks a woman with splayed legs.

“Not yet, miss, but this is my sixth, and I can tell something isn’t right.”

The woman should be in a hospital. Grace puts her at the head of the line. When Amy appears in the doorway, Grace gives her the list. Amy calls the name of the pregnant woman, who can barely walk across the floor.

Grace sits at the desk, and tries to look official in the gray suit her mother remade to fit her. She finds a clean piece of paper on which she can write the names of the newcomers to the clinic when they come in. After that, she stacks all of the papers that were already on the desk into a large pile. She whisks off all of the coins and dollar bills and puts them into the top right-hand drawer. When the rest of the desk is clean, she lifts a handful of material and sorts by dates, the most recent first: bills in one pile, checks in another, Dr. Lighthart’s notes, letters from patients, medical reading material, official forms. She opens every envelope, reasoning that she can’t complete her job without doing so. She tries, when she scans a letter, to ascertain which pile it belongs to without reading all of the details. She’s invading privacy, she knows, and she doesn’t want to pry. As she works, individuals enter the waiting room and walk to the desk, where she records their names and symptoms. Amy and the doctor will be working nonstop for hours.

When Grace is finished with the sorting, she hustles to the kitchen to find plates to lay on each of the piles so that they won’t blow about when someone opens the door. She writes notes identifying the piles, and tapes them to the plates. The scheme looks unprofessional at best, but it’s all she has to work with. When finished with the top of the desk, she begins to search through the drawers. There are five, two on either side of her skirt, a horizontal one in front of her. One drawer is so stuffed with material, Grace can’t, without a knife, get it open.