"I know."
"Mrs. Ochoa. Folasade. The Szendreys have a baby."
"I know." Her voice cracked on it and she pressed her lips together until it came back. "I told myself the stores pay. That's what they said in the first email, the very first one, they said the merchants are insured, nobody's ever out a dime. And for strangers, in other states, I could believe that. I could believe that for a year. And then they sent me a message and said they needed local names, and I said no. I said no, Leland. And they said all right, no problem, and the next week no boxes came, and the week after that no boxes came, and Sunhaven sent me a letter." She stopped. "So I went down to the clubhouse with my key."
I didn't say anything. There wasn't anything I could say that would be both true and kind, and I'd run out of the energy to pick one.
"He knows me at four o'clock," she said suddenly. "Did you know that? Most of the day, he doesn't. But at four o'clock, when they bring him into the sunroom and I'm sitting there, there's about twenty minutes where he knows exactly who I am. The nurses say it's the routine. It's the light in that room. I don't care what it is. Twenty minutes a day, I have my husband." She looked at me then, straight, the way she'd looked up at my camera on the night of the eighteenth. "If they'd moved him to a Medicaid bed it would've been in Pocatello. Three and a half hours. Every bed closer had a waiting list a year long. I'd have gotten him on Sundays, maybe. If the roads were good. And he would not have known me on Sundays, Leland. He'd have known the four o'clock nurse."
"You could have asked for help."
"From who?" she said. "From the board?"
And she laughed, a terrible little laugh, the same quick bright laugh she used at meetings, and then she put her hand over her mouth like it had gotten out without her permission.