Then she looked at the window.
The living room window of the apartment above the Suds 'n' Duds looked straight across Front Street at the lit front of Stimson Drug. Ruthie had looked at that view so many times she could have drawn it with her eyes closed: the red-and-white sign with the S that buzzed slightly in wet weather, the mortar-and-pestle painted on the glass of the door, the bench under the green awning where the school bus stopped in the mornings, the rack of firewood bundles for sale by the ice chest. It was sixty-one steps from the bottom of their outside staircase to the pharmacy door. Ruthie had counted. On a school morning, with her backpack on, she could do it in forty seconds.
Her mother could not do it at all. Not tonight.
Ruthie watched her mother work it through. She could see every step of it on her mother's face. To go across the street her mother would have to take Teddy, because you never, ever left Teddy alone, not for one minute, not to take out the trash, not to get the mail; a trach could plug, a trach could slip, and a baby who could not cry out loud could not tell you. To take Teddy she would have to switch him to the portable ventilator and the portable oxygen, and pack the go-bag with the spare trach and the suction machine and the bag-valve mask, and strap all of it onto the special stroller, and then get the stroller down the outside staircase, which was steep and wooden and had no cover, and it was raining now, a cold steady October rain that made the stairs shine like they had been varnished. On a good day it took her mother twenty-five minutes to get Teddy out the door and two people to get the stroller down the stairs. On a good day her mother was not shaky and nauseated with a blood sugar of three hundred and twenty.
Ruthie watched her mother think about calling 911 and decide that you did not call 911 to pick up a prescription. She watched her think about calling the neighbors, and remember that Mrs. Esposito downstairs was at her daughter's in Columbus and that the young couple in 2A worked nights, and that the people at church who used to bring casseroles had mostly stopped bringing them after the first year, not because they were bad people but because a year is a long time. She watched her remember that Stimson's had stopped delivering when the delivery boy went off to college. She watched her mother get to the end of the list, and then she watched her mother look at her.
Ruthie had been waiting for that.
"I can go," Ruthie said.
"No."
"It's across the street. You can watch me the whole way. You watch me every morning."
"That's in daylight. That's a bus stop."
"It's sixty-one steps."
"Ruthie."