Chapter 1: Please Bring Your Mother

ISLA

“Mommy, how do you spell promise?”

Junie asked it from the break room table without looking up. She had my work tablet propped against the coffee maker and her clipboard under her elbow, and the tip of her tongue was poking out of the corner of her mouth, which is where she keeps it when she is doing something important.

“It’s P, R, O, M, I, S, E,” I said. “Who are you writing to, baby?”

I spelled it slowly. It is not a word I use much anymore.

“It’s confidential.”

She is five and three quarters. I have no idea where she learned the word confidential, but I suspect a television judge.

I was eating cold noodles at the counter, because it was twenty to seven and I had not sat down since seven that morning. My whale scrubs had a juice stain on the knee shaped exactly like Ohio.

It was my ninth day back in Halbrook, Michigan, and my ninth day on the Juniper Ward at Cole Memorial Hospital. At four o’clock somebody had pinned a memo to the bulletin board outside the nurses’ station.

I had read it three times. It said the board of directors would review “the future of pediatric inpatient services” at its March meeting, and that our families “may be served more efficiently by MeridianCare partner facilities in the Grand Rapids area.”

Bev Tran, our charge nurse, had read it once and said a word I will not repeat in front of a child.

Grand Rapids is two hours away. Efficiently is the word rich men use when somebody else’s kid gets the longer ambulance ride.

“Mommy, how do you spell liar?”

I put my fork down. “Why do you need to spell liar?”

“I’m quoting.”

“Who are you quoting?”

She looked up at me with her grey eyes. Everybody in Halbrook says Junie has my face, and they are right about the freckles and the curls. Nobody ever asks where the grey eyes came from, and I have never once volunteered.

“I’m quoting you,” she said. “You were talking to Grandma in the kitchen last night, and you said the boss of this hospital used to be nice and broke a promise. Then Grandma said he lies like a rug.”

I said that in the kitchen at eleven at night with the door shut. I forgot that my daughter can hear through doors, and she did not get that skill from me.

“That was a grown-up conversation,” I said.

“I know it was. That’s why I wrote it down.”

“We don’t write liar to people, Junie, even when we’re quoting.”

She thought about it, tapping her pencil on the clipboard. “I’ll say it nicer, then.”

Bev put her head around the door. She has run the Juniper Ward for twenty years, and her voice can stop a crash cart in a hallway. “Isla, Bed Twelve’s pump is alarming, and he won’t let me near it because he says I have cold hands.”

“I’ll be right there.” I pointed my fork at Junie. “Give me ten minutes, and don’t touch anything except the cartoons.”

“I’m not touching anything,” she said. “I’m dictating.”

I should have asked her what she meant by dictating. Milo’s pump was beeping and I was tired, and I walked out of that room.

Milo Reyes was sitting up in Bed Twelve with his arms folded over his blanket. He is seven and has been bald as an egg since Christmas. His leukemia was answering the chemo slowly, and his mother had cried in the parents’ lounge after she read the memo.

“Bev’s hands are like a freezer, Isla,” he said. “I checked.”

“I believe you.” I unkinked his line, and the pump stopped complaining. “Stop rolling onto your IV, and we’ll get along fine.”

“Are they closing my room?”

The polite answer came out first, the way it always does. “Nobody is closing anything tonight, sweetheart.”

I stopped making promises I can’t keep six years ago. I learned that from an expert.

“Junie says she’s going to fix it,” Milo said.

“Junie is five.”

“She says she’s five and three quarters.” He looked at Doctor Blub, the fat orange goldfish in the tank on his windowsill. “Can she bring the owl book tomorrow? She does the voices good.”

My hand stopped on his blanket.

“She can bring it,” I said, “as long as nobody writes in it.”

“Why can’t anybody write in it?”

“Somebody already did.”

I was back in the break room at sixteen minutes past seven. Junie had her hands folded on top of her clipboard like a lawyer waiting for a verdict.

“I sent it,” she said.

“You sent what?”

“I sent my complaint. I sent it two minutes ago.”

I picked up the tablet. The newest message in my sent folder was addressed to the Office of the Chief Executive, and it had gone out from my account at 7:14 p.m.

Lord, You know I love this child. Please remind me of that in the next thirty seconds.

I opened it and read it.

Dear Boss of the Hospital, this is a formal complaint. You are closing the room where my friend Milo gets better. My mommy says you used to be nice but you broke a promise. Please fix it. My name is Junie Penn, and I am five and three quarters.

“How did you find him?” I asked her. My voice came out very calm, which is how you know a nurse is in trouble.

“I pressed the hospital phone book, and then I pressed the man with the tie.”

For nine days I had worked in his building without saying his name, not even inside my own head.

I had gotten good at the long way around it. I said the ninth floor. I said the chief executive. When I absolutely had to, I said the man with the tie.

“Bev,” I called, “can you unsend an email in this hospital?”

Bev appeared in the doorway with a juice box. “Honey, nothing in this building comes back once it leaves. In 2019 I emailed the whole hospital a picture of my bunion, and the cardiologists still bring it up.”

God bless Bev Tran, who has never once made a situation better on purpose.

I sat down for the first time in twelve hours and twisted the ring Owen gave me, the gold band with the little sapphire. A chief executive gets a thousand emails a day, I told myself, and he never reads the ones from kindergartners.

At 7:18 the tablet chimed.

Junie leaned across the table. “Did the boss write back?”

It was two sentences long.

Ms. Penn, I have received your complaint. Please bring it to my office at nine tomorrow, and bring your mother.

“He called me Ms. Penn,” Junie whispered, as if she had been knighted.

It was signed Adrian Cole.

The last time I saw that name, it was on the front page of the Halbrook Courier, under a photograph of him smiling beside another woman. It was the mornin

g after the night I meant to tell him I was carrying his child.