Denny looked at the crib. He looked at the monitor with its green numbers. He looked at Ruthie, standing in the bathroom doorway with a towel in her hands and her hair wet at the temples, watching him to see what he would say.
"Yes," he said. "Somebody can stay."
"Do you know anything about trachs, Chief?"
"No, ma'am," said Denny. "But I'm told it's a ten-year-old's specialty."
Joyce came at 9:40 with two bottles of ginger ale and a carton of chicken broth and saltine crackers and a bag of the frozen peas she used for her bad shoulder, which turned out to be exactly right for the back of Lauren's neck. She took one look at the apartment and hung her coat on the hook next to Ruthie's purple backpack as if she had been coming here for years. Joyce had been the librarian at Kellam Falls Elementary for twenty-six years before she retired, and when Ruthie came out of the bathroom, Joyce looked at her for a moment and said, "I know you. Third grade. You read every single one of the Wings of Fire books in four weeks and then came and complained to me that there weren't more."
"There weren't," said Ruthie.
"There weren't," agreed Joyce. "It was a scandal." Then she saw the laminated card in Denny's shirt pocket, where he had put it without thinking, and she took it out, and looked at it, and looked at Ruthie. "Secret Codes and Signals for Young Detectives," she said. "Orange cover. Nineteen eighty-seven. I almost weeded that book three times. It kept getting checked out."
"I checked it out eleven times," said Ruthie. "I had to keep renewing it."
Joyce put the card back in Denny's pocket very gently and patted it, and did not say anything else, and went into the kitchen to find a saucepan for the broth.
At 9:51 the pharmacy's fill-in pharmacist climbed the outside stairs in the rain in her own raincoat, with Denny's white bag and a glucose meter in a blue box and a container of test strips and a box of lancets, and a receipt for thirty-five dollars stapled to the top. She stood on the landing and would not come in.
"I ran it on her card after all," Neha Kulkarni said. "The copay. I didn't want there to be a problem with Mr. Stimson. I kept the slip for her to sign." She held out Denny's bag. "And you forgot this. Your wife called the store. Twice."