Then the girl turned, under the awning, and pointed the flashlight across the street, straight at him.
It took him a second to realize. Then he fumbled the card out of his pocket and held it up in the morning light with the white bag from the pharmacy hanging from his other hand, the bag with his metformin in it and his glucose meter in its blue box, and his name stapled to the top.
Dash. Dot. Dot dot dot. Dash.
He found them one at a time. T. E. S. T.
He looked up. Across the street the girl was pointing at the bag in his hand. Then she pointed at her own finger and made a little stabbing motion with her thumb, like a lancet, and then pointed at him again, with great seriousness, the way her mother must point at her about her homework.
Denny laughed out loud on the empty sidewalk. A woman going into the laundromat with a basket of sheets looked at him strangely.
He did not have a flashlight. Ruthie had the only one. He stood there for a moment with the card in his hand, thinking about what he would send if he could, and about the list in his head, and about four o'clock, and about tonight, which was still a black square with nothing in it, no nurse and no plan and a woman who would sit up beside a crib until the chime went high-low-high, and about whether a person could build a way through a thing like that the way the girl had built one through the pharmacy, out of a library book and a laminator and sixty-one steps. He did not know. He thought you probably found out the same way she had, by doing every single thing you could think of and then waiting to see if anyone would let it count.
He took out his phone instead, and turned on its flashlight, and held up the card. He sent it slowly. He did not get the spacing right, and he knew it.
Dash dash dash. Dash dot dash.
Across the street the girl considered this. Then, under the green awning, as the school bus came around the corner from Mill Street with its lights blinking, she lifted her father's flashlight one more time and sent him back a single, long, unmistakable question mark — dot dot dash dash dot dot — perfectly spaced, and then climbed onto the bus without looking back.
He stood there on the wet sidewalk until the bus was gone, trying to decide whether she meant that his OK had been badly sent, or that she did not believe it yet. Then he got into his truck, and took the blue box out of the white bag, and sat for a while reading the instructions in the cold clean light before he went to make his calls.