At seven-fifty-two the door opened, and Johanna Treloar came in, and Lauren knew in the first second that something was very wrong.
She was walking like someone on the deck of a boat. She came in through the door and stopped and put one hand out to the back of the nearest stool, and the hand missed and caught the next one, and she stood there holding on. Her scarf had come untied and hung down around her neck, and her hair was white with frost, and her eyebrows and her eyelashes were white with frost, and her face under it was not red the way a face should be in that cold but gray, a terrible flat gray like dishwater, and her lips were blue. She was still in the cardigan. She was not wearing the work gloves. Her bare hands were white at the fingertips, dead white, waxy, like candles.
"Johanna," Lauren said, and came around the counter.
"I'm all right," Johanna said. "I'm all right, I only need to sit."
She did not sit. Her knees went. Lauren got there in time, barely, and got her arms around her under the arms, and the old woman was so light, so terribly light, like a bundle of sticks in a sack, and so cold that Lauren could feel it coming through her own uniform. Somebody at the counter said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa," and the man from the courthouse was off his stool and had her other side, and between them they got her down onto the bench of the first booth, half sitting and half lying, with her head against the wall.
"Call somebody," Lauren said. "Shirl. Call."
Shirl was already at the phone by the register, dialing the fire department number off the card taped to the wall. Stevo came out from behind the grill wiping his hands. Johanna was coughing now, a deep wet terrible cough that seemed to come up from somewhere far below her, and each time it came she bent forward with it and then fell back against the wall, and her breath rattled in her chest like gravel in a can. Lauren put her palm on her forehead. It was burning. That was the thing that did not make sense, that Lauren would remember. Her hands were ice and her forehead was burning like a stove lid.
"How long have you been sick?" Lauren said. "Johanna. How long have you been out in this?"
"Since four," Johanna said. "Since four, I had to do the four."