The Boy I Covered By Noon

“Can you send the termination letter to a fax for me,” I said. My voice was steady. I was almost proud of how steady. “I am enrolling him under a qualifying life event and I need the date in writing.”

“I can send that right now,” Pam said.

The fax machine on Lorna’s credenza woke up and buzzed and spit out a single warm page before I even hung up. Lorna pulled it, read it, and set it on the desk facing me.

Removed. Effective the first. Reason: subscriber election.

He had chosen it. There was no mystery left in it. He had sat at a computer during open enrollment and taken his diabetic son off the good insurance and put his girlfriend on in the same click, because the plan let you cover one domestic partner and he wanted to cover her, and somewhere in his head he had told himself a story about how he would switch it back.

By noon

“All right,” Lorna said. She was all business now, and business was exactly what I needed. “Fill these out. Both pages. Cole’s full name, his social, his date of birth. Sign here and here. I need the fax as your proof of loss, and I have it.”

I filled them out. My handwriting was better than my hands felt.

“Effective date,” I said. “When does it start.”

Lorna looked at the fax, looked at the calendar, looked at me.

“Loss of coverage special enrollment,” she said. “The plan rule is it can be retroactive to the day the old coverage ended, so there is no gap. I am going to backdate it to the first. He has not had a covered day missing. Not one.”

“Retroactive,” I said.

“Not one day without insurance. On paper it will look like he never lost it.” She stamped the form, the real kind of stamp, ink on paper, and the sound of it was the best sound I had heard all morning. “I will walk this to my director for the signature myself. You will have a member number before you leave this building.”

I looked at the clock on her wall. The one next to the crooked photo of her grandkids.

It was eleven forty in the morning.

“Lorna,” I said. “He was dropped at nine forty and he is covered at eleven forty.”

“Covered before lunch,” she said. “Now eat a butterscotch, you look like a ghost.”