The Bill Our Town Paid In Secret

Amber had the calculator app open on her phone and a legal pad in front of her with three columns on it. The truck. The cedar chest that had been her grandmother’s. The four hundred dollars still sitting in my 401k from the summer I worked at the elevator before they made it a real retirement account.

“If we sell the truck outright, not finance it to somebody, we clear about eleven thousand,” she said. “That still leaves twenty seven.”

“I know what it leaves.”

“I’m not trying to make you feel bad, Cody. I’m doing math.”

I knew she wasn’t trying to make me feel bad. That was almost worse. My wife was sitting at our kitchen table on a Tuesday night doing math on whether her husband needed a truck to get to work, and she was doing it calm, like a woman folding laundry, because somebody had to be calm and I clearly was not up to the job that week.

Nora was asleep down the hall. Two years old, six weeks out from open heart surgery at Wesley in Wichita, a hole in the wall between the two bottom chambers of her heart that the surgeon had closed with a patch about the size of a dime. She was doing fine. Running around the living room again, bossing the dog, yelling at cartoons. The hole in her heart was closed.

The hole in our checking account was thirty eight thousand dollars wide, and nothing a surgeon could patch.

That was the number on the statement from the hospital. Patient responsibility, it said, after insurance. Our insurance through the co-op where I work on the maintenance crew had paid a good chunk of the real bill, which from what the itemized sheet showed had run somewhere past ninety thousand dollars once you added the surgeon, the anesthesia, the cardiac unit for four nights, and a helicopter transfer from the regional hospital the night Nora first turned the wrong color of blue around her lips. Insurance paid most of that. But the plan the co-op switched to in January was a high-deductible one, and the helicopter and the cardiac unit stay both counted as out of network, which is how a bill “after insurance” could still land at thirty eight thousand dollars. On top of it we had burned through gas to Wichita and motel rooms every night the Ronald McDonald House was full. What was left for us, the piece with our name on it, was thirty eight thousand dollars.