She shook her head and said through tight, thin lips, “I can’t get coverage because I only work thirty-four hours a week. By-Smart says that isn’t full-time work, it has to be forty hours a week. So Bron buys the insurance, for him and April, we decided we couldn’t afford to cover me, and when the hospital, when they called the company yesterday, it turns out that that’s all the coverage she gets for being sick and we pay, Mother of God, we pay two thousand six hundred dollars a year. If I’d known, I’d’ve been putting all that money in a savings account for April.”

“What is it that’s really wrong with April?” I asked.

Sandra twisted her hands together. “I don’t know. The doctors use fancy language so you won’t know if they’re doing the right thing for your kid or not. Were you working her too hard because she’s mine?”

I wished I’d listened to Mr. Contreras and stayed home. All I wanted right now was to crawl into a cave and sleep until spring.

“Can we talk to a doctor? If I understand what the diagnosis is, maybe I can help find treatment.” I was thinking of my friend Lotty Herschel, who’s a surgeon at Beth Israel Hospital on Chicago’s far North Side. Lotty treats her share of indigent patients; she might know how to help the Czernins dance around the insurance system.

“She fainted once, last summer, when she’d been at a basketball camp, but I didn’t think anything of it, girls faint all the time, I know I did when I was her age. I wanted her to have every opportunity, I wasn’t going to have you lord it over my kid the way you do over me.”

I blinked, reeling under the flow of words and the contradictory ideas jostling for airspace. I was about to utter a reflexive protest, that I didn’t lord it over her, but when I remembered our history together I felt myself blushing. That night just before the homecoming dance, if I could call up one evening of my life to do differently that would be the one, unless it was the time I’d snuck a pint of whiskey from Lazinski’s the night my mother died—enough. I had enough bad memories to make me squirm all day if I dwelt on them.

The nurse who’d tried to intervene in Sandra and Bron’s fight was still lingering nearby. She agreed to page a doctor to come to April’s room to talk to the family. While we waited, I crossed the hall to April’s room. Sandra followed me without protest.