The dachshund lady gave her a look and Mommy said, “Let’s go in the other room. Teddy, finish that math homework.”

They went to the living room and she shut the kitchen door. I heard her say, “Oh, that dog. I can’t bear to look at him. And don’t let him sit on my upholstered dining chairs! It’s not hygienic.”

I got out my math homework. I had a headache. It had been sitting there for a few days now, like a toad at the front of my skull. I stared at the page, which throbbed and swam. It was hard to concentrate with my brain pulsing like this. I seemed to have at least attempted some of the math problems last night, although I could also see that I had got most of them wrong. I sighed and took out my eraser. The dachshund lady’s voice drifted in and out. The kitchen door was thin pine board.

“Something stinks,” she said. “All week there have been these big meetings, and yesterday the cops came. They’re interviewing us all, one by one in the nurses’ lounge. It’s not very convenient. It means we have to go to the cafeteria for coffee. That’s three whole floors down in the elevator, and three floors back up again. It uses up all my break.”

“Goodness,” Mommy said. “What in heavens is that all about?”

“I don’t know. They didn’t get to me yet; they’re going alphabetically. The girls won’t say. They all looked kind of upset when they came out.”

“You know,” Mommy said, “it doesn’t surprise me.”

“No?” I can almost hear the dachshund lady lean forward, anticipating.

“Think about it. All that business with money. Where’s the money going, I’d like to know? We’re running the same ward we always have, on the same budget. Why is there suddenly so little to go around?”

“Wow,” says the dachshund lady on an indrawn breath. “Do you think there’s some kind of … scam or something going on at the hospital?”

“It is not for me to say,” Mommy said in her gentlest voice. “But I wonder, that is all.”

I heard the dachshund lady make a clicking sound with her tongue. “It never made sense to me, that they fired you,” she said. “If I said it once I said it a million times. Now, that would explain things.”

Mommy didn’t answer and I imagined her shaking her head with her gentle, quizzical smile.

I started to feel upset, I didn’t know why. So I got into the old chest freezer. I pulled the lid down on top of me and I felt better straight away.