In minutes, there was a knock at the door and the voice of Anthony Stith, the head of the fire department, rang out in a melodious but thunderous boom. Boy, that was quick, I thought.

“Anybody home?” he called.

“Back here!” I answered but rushed out to meet him all the same. I pulled my cardigan around me. “Oh, Anthony! Thank you for coming!”

“Happy to help,” he said pleasantly.

Momma, for once, said nothing. Anthony stepped into the room. Two EMS workers waited in the hallway with a collapsible gurney. They must’ve been close by to arrive here so quickly. But then, nobody was that far away from anybody on our tiny island, which was perhaps four miles long, depending on erosion and accretion.

“How y’all doing, Miss Katherine?” he asked.

“Obviously, not so well,” she answered, as if it were Anthony’s fault she was lying on the floor.

I looked through the window at Archie’s little boys chasing each other around their yard.

“They’re cute little rascals, aren’t they?” Anthony said. “Terrible thing about their momma’s passing, isn’t it?”

“I’d give anything in the world to have kids like them,” I said.

“Oh, please,” Momma said. “Children are so overrated.”

“Thanks a lot, Momma,” I said and rolled my eyes at Anthony.

He just smiled and, undeterred by her notorious bad manners, knelt by her side.

“Do you mind if I poke around a little bit?”

“Just what do you mean by that?”

Anthony smiled again. “I mean, do you have any pain anywhere? Can you move your arms?”

Momma moved her arms. “I imagine I’m still alive.”

“That’s good,” he said. “Now, can you point your toes?”

She did as she was told, but when he asked her to bring her knee up to her chest, she grimaced in pain.

“I don’t like the looks of that,” Anthony said. “Now, Miss Katherine, I know you don’t like going to the hospital and all . . .”

“Oh, no!” she said, with the smallest objection on record. “Not the hospital!”

He was joking. My mother loved the hospital! She thought it was like going to a spa. In fact, she kept an overnight bag packed, just in case.

The fellows from EMS moved in, lowered the gurney to the floor, and between them managed to lift my mother’s considerable bulk onto it.

“Get my bag from the closet, Holly! And my medicine. And call Leslie! She’ll want to know.”

“Yes, Momma. I will.”

My sister, Leslie, would not care. The only thing Leslie had ever cared about was getting out of here. And she was reasonably nice to me because I took care of the beast of a mother we shared. I always wondered if Leslie thought I was going to be Momma’s nursemaid forever. It wasn’t that I wanted such a fancy life. But I did want more than this.