"That's good." Her mother straightened. "That's good."
At 5:15 the on-call doctor called back. Ruthie heard only her mother's half: yes, type one since twelve; yes, pump failure; no, no long-acting on hand; two-forty-seven, then two-ninety; yes, small ketones on the strip, she'd checked; no, no vomiting, a little queasy; yes, she understood; yes, Stimson Drug on Front Street, the one across from her apartment; yes, they were open until nine. Thank you. Thank you, Doctor. Thank you so much.
At 5:40 the phone rang again, and it was the nursing agency, and her mother walked into the bathroom to take the call and shut the door, which she did only when she did not want Ruthie to hear her face. Ruthie heard it anyway, through the door. Vonda had fallen on the steps outside her own house and broken her wrist. She was all right. She was at the urgent care. There was no one else on the agency's list tonight who was trained on a home ventilator and lived within fifty miles of Kellam Falls. They were very sorry. They would try for tomorrow. They were very, very sorry.
When her mother came out of the bathroom she had washed her face. She sat down at the kitchen table across from Ruthie's fractions worksheet and looked at it as if she had forgotten what fractions were.
"So that's the night," she said.
Ruthie's father was in Florida. He was a lineman for Buckeye Power and Light, and when a hurricane took down a coast, the utilities from the north sent their crews south in long convoys of white bucket trucks to put the poles back up, and her father had been gone for nineteen days, sleeping four hours a night in a church gym in a town called Arcadia, and calling home every night at ten on a phone screen with his face sunburned and his eyes red. He could not come back. Even if he left right now he would be fifteen hours on the road. Ruthie knew without asking that her mother would not tell him tonight, would not let him drive fifteen hours on four hours of sleep. Her mother would say on the phone at ten that everything was fine.
"I can stay up," Ruthie said. "I can watch Teddy's numbers. I know all the numbers."
"You have school."
"I can stay up anyway."
Her mother reached across the table and put her hand over Ruthie's, which was how she said no and thank you at the same time.
By six-thirty the line on her mother's phone had climbed past three hundred and was still pointing up, a thin red line poking out the top of the shaded band like a weed through a fence. Her mother did another shot. She checked her ketones with a strip, peeing in a paper cup in the bathroom and dipping the strip and holding it next to the color chart on the bottle, and she came out and said "small to moderate" in a voice that was trying to be ordinary. She drank a tall glass of water and then another one. She said she wasn't hungry. Ruthie made her a piece of toast anyway and she ate half of it, slowly, and then got up and stood at the sink for a while with her hand flat on her stomach.
At seven the pharmacy called. It was a recording. A prescription for Dalby, Lauren, was ready for pickup at Stimson Drug. Her mother listened to the whole recording with her eyes closed.