The Name I Crossed Off My Emergency Card

The nurse at the pre-op desk slid the little white card across to me and tapped it with her fingernail. “This printed from your last visit,” she said. “Just look it over and tell me if anything’s changed.”

It was a little after six in the morning at the regional hospital in Quincy.

The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, and the coffee in the waiting room smelled like it had been sitting since midnight. I had not eaten since supper.

I read the card the way you read something you already know by heart. My name, Gail Moser. My birthday.

My address on Third Street, two blocks up from the river. Then the last line, typed in neat little letters.

Emergency contact: Vicki Moser. Daughter.

My last visit had been my gallbladder, four years ago. Vicki had driven me that time.

She brought me a milkshake on the way home and made me laugh so hard about a billboard that I had to hold my stomach where the stitches were.

The nurse held out a blue pen. She was maybe thirty, in blue scrubs, with her hair pulled back tight and a clipboard on the counter by her computer.

She had the patient, kind look of somebody who had already seen a lot of scared people that morning.

I took the pen. My glasses kept sliding down my nose, the way they do when I’m nervous, and I pushed them back up with one knuckle.

I was wearing my teal hoodie because the paper said wear something easy to get on and off.

Dottie Hess was standing right beside me.

She had on her red cardigan, the cable-knit one, and she had her big canvas tote over her arm with two knitting needles poking out of the top like antennas.

Dottie is 72. She has lived next door to me for twenty-five years.

She was a school secretary at the grade school for most of that time, which means she has seen every kind of trouble a family can make and has never once told it to anybody.

She’d been up since four o’clock to drive me the forty minutes down to Quincy.

Behind us, in one of those beige waiting-room chairs, sat my son, Tim.

He’s 36, a lineman for the electric co-op, broad as a door through the shoulders, with a short brown beard he started growing the winter his son was born.

Tim had come straight off an overnight outage call. A wind had come through after midnight and taken down a line out past the grain elevator.

He still had his gray work jacket on, and he smelled like cold air and diesel.

“Mom?” he said, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “Something wrong with the card?”

“No, honey,” I said.

Then I drew one straight line through my daughter’s name.

The nurse watched the pen move. She didn’t say a word. I imagine she’s seen people cross off husbands and sisters and sons. I imagine she has learned to keep her face still.

Under the line I wrote, in my own handwriting, Dottie Hess, neighbor.

Then I wrote Dottie’s cell phone number, which I know by heart because it’s the number I call when the power goes out or the furnace makes that noise.

Dottie put her hand on my shoulder. Just set it there, light, the way you’d steady a jar on a shelf. She didn’t ask me a single thing. That is the kind of neighbor Dottie is.

Tim stood up and came to the desk. He looked down at the card and then at me. “Mom,” he said, low. “That’s Vicki’s spot.”

“Not today,” I said, and I handed the card back to the nurse.