“Nope. I’m actually doin’ pretty good. After all this, I need to walk and clear my head,” she answered.
“I’m here if you need me, and I’m sorry,” Dill said.
He was gone before she could answer. Anger topped the list of all the other emotions that she’d experienced that week. Leaving Bloom might not be so difficult after all.
Cricket always went straight to the café after church, changed clothes in the restroom, and got right out onto the floor, and she was in a hurry. The parking places were all filled in front of the café, which meant she’d have to park on the next block. But then she saw a truck pull away, and she quickly grabbed that empty space.
She was running late. People were clustered up around the front of the place waiting for tables or booths. She slid out of the truck and grabbed her purse. In the rush, she didn’t even see the crack in the sidewalk until the spike heel of her favorite Sunday pumps popped right off. Then the heel on the other shoe went out from under her, and she fell flat on her butt right there on Main Street in Bloom, Texas. The first thing she did was look around to see if anyone saw her. For the first time, she was thankful that no one was paying a bit of attention to her.
She tried to stand up, but her leg hurt so bad that she collapsed. Her breath was coming in short gasps, and her stomach did a couple of flips with nausea. From the acute pain in her ankle, she figured it was broken. She jerked at her skirt so that her underpants weren’t showing, but it was tangled up around her waist. Everything started spinning around her so fast that it was hard to focus—and then she heard Jennie Sue’s voice.
“Stay with me. I’ll call 911,” she said.
Cricket opened her eyes and grabbed Jennie Sue’s hand. “Don’t. Insurance won’t cover it. Just take me to the emergency room.”
“I don’t have a car.” Jennie Sue started digging in her purse.
“Take me in the truck. Keys in my purse.” Sticky sweat popped out on Cricket’s forehead. “Now! People are looking.” She absolutely couldn’t bear the embarrassment of people seeing her chubby thighs and white cotton underpants. She’d endure Lucifer if he was shielding her from everyone’s eyes rather than Jennie Sue, but he wasn’t, so Jennie Sue would have to do.
“I’ll call Rick and he can take you, then.”
“No! He can’t get into town. I have the truck. Are you stupid? If there was any other way, I wouldn’t ask you,” Cricket moaned.
“Okay, okay, stop your whining.” Jennie Sue helped her to her feet and got her into the passenger side of the truck before retrieving her purse from the sidewalk and handing it to her.
Amos knocked on the window as Jennie Sue crawled into the driver’s seat and Cricket tossed her the keys.
“You okay? I saw Jennie Sue helping you up,” he asked.
She nodded and yelled through the glass, “Just a little twist of the ankle. I’ll be fine. Jennie Sue is takin’ me home. Thanks for askin’.”
Dammit to hell on a rusty poker! Now he’d go tell everyone in town that Jennie Sue was nice enough to take her to the hospital. Everyone would think they were friends.
Cricket shoved her purse across the console. “Center compartment, and please hurry. I’m getting sick to my stomach.”
Jennie Sue left at least a week’s worth of tire rubber on the pavement when she peeled out, and by the time she reached the city limits sign on the south side of town, she was doing eighty in a forty-five. Cricket opened her mouth to tell her to slow down but only moaned when more pain shot all the way to her hip.
It was normally a fifteen-minute drive to Sweetwater, but Jennie Sue brought the truck to a greasy sliding stop in front of the emergency-room doors in less than ten minutes. She hopped out, rushed inside, and returned with a nurse pushing a wheelchair in what seemed like mere seconds.
“Sit still and let us help you,” the nurse said.
“It’s only a sprain.” The world took another couple of spins when Cricket tried to put a little weight on it.
“That can be worse and take longer to heal than a break sometimes,” the nurse said. “Settle into the chair, and we’ll go to the business center to get your information.”
“My stuff is in my purse. You take care of it,” she told Jennie Sue.
“Okay, then,” the nurse said. “We’ve had a slow day, so I can take you right on in.”
The nurse rolled Cricket into a triage room and left her sitting in the wheelchair. A guy in blue scrubs looked up from a computer and asked her how much she weighed—she lied by fifteen pounds, just in case Jennie Sue saw any of the records. How tall she was—she stretched it and said that she was an inch taller. Then he glanced at her swollen ankle that had begun to turn purple and took her straight to a cubicle.
“They’ll be in and take you down to X-ray in a minute,” he said, and disappeared.
Immediately Cricket began to worry about the lies she’d told. If they had to anesthetize her, then would they give her enough to keep her under? She sure didn’t want to wake up before they got finished.
Jennie Sue dug around in the purse until she found Cricket’s wallet and had almost given up even finding a driver’s license when she noticed a small cloth bag. Inside she found an insurance card and all the pertinent information that the lady behind the counter needed.
She took it from Jennie Sue and said, “She will have to personally sign these papers before she is dismissed, but you can put these cards away.”
“Now can I go back there with her?”
“Only if you are family,” the woman said.
Jennie Sue opened her mouth to say that she was her friend, but then snapped it shut. One of Mabel’s old sayings—you might as well hang for a sheep as a lamb—flashed through her mind. So Jennie Sue said, “I’m her sister.”
“Then I’ll press the button so the doors will open for you,” the lady said.
“Thank you.” Jennie Sue hoped that lightning didn’t shoot out of the sky and strike her dead on her way out of the office cubicle.
A hunky male attendant was rolling Cricket down the hall in a wheelchair and into the emergency-room area. She didn’t have a bit of color in her cheeks.
“What’s the prognosis, sister?” Jennie Sue asked.
The guy stopped at a door. “I’ll go in and tell them we’re here.”
Cricket looked up with the best of her dirty looks. “I’m not—”
Jennie Sue bent down and cupped her hand over Cricket’s ear. “I had to tell them that so they’d let me come back here with you. If you blow it, you’re on your own.”
Cricket frowned and answered, “Don’t know until the doctor sees the X-rays. And—” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I appreciate you doing this for me, but we are barely friends.”
Jennie Sue’s shoulders raised in half a shrug. “After the way you’ve treated me, I’m not even sure I want to be your friend.”
“Me neither,” Cricket said. “But it seems like we’re thrown together all the time. Maybe instead of barely friends, we’re civil friends.”
“That sounds more like it.” Jennie Sue nodded.
The door opened and the guy stepped out. He glanced over at Jennie Sue. “You’ll have to wait out here, but this won’t take but a minute.”
“Yes, sir.” She sat down in a folding chair right next to the door.
Mabel used to tell Jennie Sue that everything happened for a reason, that life was like a ball of yarn. She explained that when a person got older, they could pull the loose end and look back at life and see that something that happened on a particular day had changed the course of it. Jennie Sue couldn’t think of a single reason that she had to be the one who’d been close enough to Cricket when she fell to help her.
Maybe it was to get your mind off the conversation that you had with your dad. There was no doubt it was Mabel’s voice in her head. You needed a little time to cool your heels. Remember, you do have some of that Wilshire temper even if it doesn’t show up very often.
“I don’t have my mother’s temper,” she muttered.