“If she was born with the condition, it could have happened anytime, anywhere, Sandra,” I said, trying to keep my voice level. “What do the doctors say they can do to treat her?”

“Nothing. Nothing but rest unless we can come up with the money to pay their bills. All the blacks, they have it easy, just show their welfare cards and their kids get whatever they need, but people like us, people who work hard all the time, what do we have to show for it?”

Sandra glared up the hall at the woman with the small child, who happened to be black, as if the four-year-old had designed the managed care companies that decreed what medical care Americans could get. A nurse who’d come out of one of the patient rooms stepped forward, trying to intervene, but the Czernins were in their own private universe, the world of anger, and no one else could get into it with them. The nurse went back to whatever she’d been doing, but I stayed on the battlefield.

“And I’m married to Mr. Wonderful here, who hasn’t been home one night all week and then acts like he’s Saint Joseph, the greatest father of all time.” Sandra turned her bitter face back to Bron. “I’m surprised you even know your own daughter’s name, you sure as hell forgot her birthday this year, out with that English bitch, or was it Danuta Tomzak from Lazinski’s bar?”

Bron grabbed Sandra’s thin shoulders and started shaking her. “I do love my daughter, you damn cunt, you will not say different, not here, not anywhere. And I can get the fucking money to pay for her heart. You tell that SOB doctor not to move her, not to check her out of the hospital, I’ll have the money for him by Tuesday, easy.”

He stormed down the corridor and slammed his way through a swinging door that led to a stairwell. Sandra’s mouth was a thin bitter line.

“Mary had the Prince of Peace, I get the Prince of Pricks.” She turned her scowl on me. “Is he going to ask that English woman he’s been screwing for money?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I don’t know if she has any.”

And who forks over a hundred grand to the daughter of a man she cares about only as a good story to tell her friends back home? I didn’t say it—Sandra was only clutching at straws; she didn’t have any sense right now, no sense of what was possible and what wasn’t.

“You said the insurance would cover only ten thousand dollars. Is that your insurance?”