In the waiting room, I looked around at the wheelchairs, the old women in shawls. A child couldn’t stop trembling. Being isolated on the farm, I had cut myself off from a lot. My puffy coveralls felt almost too hot in the waiting room. I wore comfortable boots that fit. I was warm and fed. Fine.

Grayson was talking on and on. “Canned goods are going. Nonperishables. Propane.”

I pulled out my phone, but didn’t dial the number. Lobo’s number. My mama didn’t have her own phone. Too expensive, he said. If I called, he would answer. He would want to know why I was calling, what had I done wrong. I shoved the phone back in my pocket. “After you’re done here?” I said to Grayson. “We’re going to Walmart.”

Seeing a doctor took all morning. When she finally came into the room where we had been placed—a storage closet, based on the mops and brooms and rolls of brown paper towels crowded in around us—her eyes looked scared. I sat on an upside-down bucket because there was only one chair and I let Grayson have it.

The doctor didn’t ask our names. She didn’t introduce herself. She didn’t even ask how it happened. She had a large brace ready in her hands. She unwrapped it and strapped it around Grayson’s foot.

“This is a walking cast,” she explained, tightening the straps. “You’ll need it.”

Grayson looked at me, then back at the doctor. “What does that mean?”

“That means, in an ideal world, you’d rest for a few weeks. You’d stay off your foot as much as possible. You wouldn’t walk. I’d give you crutches. You’d give your bone time to heal. But we don’t live in an ideal world,” she said. “I don’t want you to be left behind.”

“Left behind?” he echoed.

And that was it. She was leaving. She had spent five minutes with us, barely. The clinic had not even taken X-rays, not that I thought Grayson could have afforded them. I had been parking when he had filled out his paperwork, but from the sick gray tone his skin was taking on, the way he had kept asking me, Is it broken? Do you think it’s broken?—like I knew—paying for this visit was going to be a problem.

The doctor moved to the door, then thought of something. She pressed her lips together. She had short, dark hair, tight as if she had curled it, the blood-shadow of lipstick that had faded away. I could tell she didn’t have time to tell us whatever it was she was going to say. “Stop by the pharmacy on your way out.”

“Why?” I asked. “Does he have a prescription?”

“No. It’s going to hurt. But we’re all out of prescription pain meds.”

“Out? How can you be out?”