The School Kitchen Job I Took to Stay Insured

Ron had the renewal papers spread across our kitchen table like a hand of cards he did not want to play. It was a Thursday night in September, eight days after my biopsy came back.

He had eaten his supper without saying much, which was not unusual. Ron has never been a talker at the table. He works with his hands all day and saves his words like he saves his nails.

I was rinsing the plates when he cleared his throat. I knew that sound. It meant a transmission was going, or a job had fallen through.

“Tam,” he said. “Come sit a minute.”

I dried my hands and sat down across from him. The papers had his insurance carrier across the top and a lot of columns I could not read upside down.

“The business plan renews October first,” he said. “The rates came in. They went up on everybody, but the spouse part went up the worst.”

“How much?”

“Three hundred and ten dollars a month more to keep you on.”

He still had not looked up. He was looking at the papers, at a line near the bottom he had circled in pencil, as if the number might change if he stared at it long enough.

“So what does that mean?” I asked, though I think I already knew. Thirty-one years of marriage teaches you to hear the end of a sentence before it is spoken.

“It means I signed it without the spouse coverage,” he said. “Just me and the guys. It starts October first.”

I sat very still. The refrigerator hummed. Out in the yard one of the dogs barked at nothing, the way they do after dark.

I had a port going into my chest the next morning. My first treatment was set for the Thursday after.

The oncologist had used words like aggressive and stage two. The nurse had handed me a folder as thick as a hymnal.

“Ron,” I said. “What am I supposed to do?”

He finally looked at me then, but only for a second. “You’ll qualify for something,” he said. “Medicaid, maybe. With the diagnosis and all. I asked around.”

I did not answer him. I finished the dishes and wiped the counter twice. Then I went to bed and lay in the dark with my hand over the lump.

What the Nurse Said

The next morning Ron drove me to Salina for the port. He waited out in the truck, returning calls to suppliers, while they took me back.

While they prepped me, the nurse who had given me the folder came by to check on me. I asked her my question before I lost my nerve.

I told her my husband was taking me off his plan on October first, and that he thought I could get on Medicaid. I asked her if that was true.

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, very gently, that Kansas does not work that way. A married woman of fifty-two, with a husband who owns a business, was not likely to qualify.

“There are some programs for women who are screened without insurance,” she said. “But you were screened under insurance. You had your mammogram on your husband’s plan.”

“So what do people do?” I asked.

“They find coverage,” she said. “Before treatment gets expensive. Honey, it is going to get expensive.”

Ron drove me home without asking how it went. I did not ask him about the insurance either. I had decided something in the night, and I was not ready to say it out loud.

That afternoon I sat at the kitchen table where Ron had sat with his papers, and I made a list on the back of a feed store receipt. It was a short list.

I could call his insurance agent myself. But the plan was in the company’s name, and only Ron could sign for it.

I could buy my own plan on the marketplace. I looked it up on the computer in the spare room. The plans ran five to seven hundred dollars a month, and the deductibles made my stomach turn.

Or I could get a job with insurance.