I felt dizzy. There was a long pause.
"Miss? Codi?"
"Rita, I'm really sorry. What can I tell you? He's losing his mind. He's got a disease that makes him confused. I think he was really just trying to do his job, but he got mixed up about what was the appropriate way to talk to you."
"I heard that. That he had that disease where you go cuckoo and turn back into a baby."
"Well, that's not quite the way I'd put it, but it's true. Occasionally rumors are true."
"Is it true you're really a doctor?"
I looked out my east window at the wall of red rock that rose steeply behind the house. "No," I said. "That isn't true. Did he tell you that?"
"No." She paused. "Well, yeah. He said something a real long time ago, that you were in medical school or something. But not this last time. I heard it from somebody else, that you're a doctor and Doc Homer's dying and you're going to take over."
"Take over?"
"Take over being the doctor for Grace. They said you already saved that baby down at Dona Althea's restaurant."
"Oh, Jesus Christ."
"Look, people say stuff, okay?" Rita said. "This town is full of major mouths. It's just what I heard."
"I'm only here till the end of the school year, so you can tell whoever's spreading that gossip they're full of shit."
"Okay. Sorry."
I regretted snapping at Rita. "It's okay," I said. "It's not your fault. I'm not used to living in a place where everybody's into everybody else's business."
"It's the bottom level, isn't it? My mom found out I was pregnant from a lady that works at the bank. Mom goes, 'What is the date today?' and the lady goes, 'The fourteenth. Your daughter will be due around Valentine's Day, won't she? I had a baby on Valentine's Day.'" Rita paused for my opinion.
"Yeah," I said. "It's the bottom level."
"Uh-huh. Mom told me after that she had to tear up three checks in a row before she could make one out right. Like that was my fault."
I set out to find Doc Homer the minute I hung up the phone, but it took me a long time to track him down, and my energy for drama kind of petered out. First I went to his office in the basement of the old hospital, up on the plateau-it was four o'clock on a Wednesday and he should have been there. But Mrs. Quintana said he'd gone downtown to check on old Mr. Moreno's oxygen machine because it was making a noise, and then he was going to stop at the grocery to pick up some pork chops. It had been half an hour so I figured I'd catch him if I skipped Mr. Moreno and went straight to the grocery, but I got there too late. The grocer, Mrs. Campbell, said he had come there first, having forgotten he needed to go to Mr. Moreno's. He'd stood for six or eight minutes in canned goods, as if lost, and then it came to him. Mrs. Campbell told me this with a sort of indulgent wink, as if he were Einstein or something and you could forgive it. He'd left for the Moreno' house, but first was going next door to the pharmacy to pick up Mr. Moreno's emphysema medication. I skipped the pharmacy and headed for the bright pink Moreno house, thinking I'd catch him as he came out and we could walk together back up the long hill, past the hospital, to his house. So the war on germs in Grace was being waged by a man who got lost in fruit cocktail. There was a clinic in Morse, just across the state line, and according to Mrs. Quintana a lot of people now drove over there. Disloyally, she had implied; she adored my father. She noted primly that they'd have problems with their state insurance forms.
On my way to the Morenos' I stopped at the P.O. There was a letter from Hallie, which I would save for later. I liked reading them alone, with time for filling in whatever she might leave out.
It turned out the Moreno visit had been unexpectedly brief, and he'd left already. The oxygen machine had stopped making noises all on its own. I walked back up the hill alone. By the time I finally did get to Doc Homer's kitchen his pork chops were cooked and he was just sitting down.
He looked surprised, almost pleased, his face turning up from the table, and he offered to put something on the stove for me but I told him I wasn't hungry. I sat down at my old place at the table where I'd passively refused food a thousand times before. But tonight it made me sad to watch him eat his solitary supper-he'd cooked one serving of an entire balanced meal, vegetables and everything. This amazed me. When Carlo went on his work binges at the hospital, I skipped meals notoriously; I was lucky if I hit all the food groups in four consecutive days. But I supposed Doc Homer had gotten the knack of solitude. For him it wasn't a waiting period, it was life.