eyes. Dark eyes, Ethan noticed, rather exotic, tilted, almond shaped and much darker than her son’s. “His eardrums—they ain’t busted, are they? Maybe I shoulda brought him in sooner, but I couldn’t get offa work—”
Ethan assured her the boy’s eardrums were still intact. “Looks pretty red and angry in there, though. We’re going to get him started right away on some antibiotics—”
“Am I gonna hafta get a shot?” Chin cocked, Michael regarded him with his brave golden glare.
Ethan laughed and squeezed the thin shoulder. “Nah—you just get to take some nasty orange medicine. You take it all, though, every time your mama tells you to, no arguing, okay? Otherwise you’re just gonna make those germs that’re causing your earaches good and mad, and then they’ll come back twice as mean next time. You understand?”
Trying not to look relieved, Michael nodded. Ethan scribbled a prescription for the antibiotic and handed it to the mother, explaining in an undertone the procedure for getting it filled free of charge at a nearby pharmacy and securing her promise to bring her son back for a checkup in three days.
Then, remembering what Mrs. Schmidt had told him about the most likely cause of the current rash of ear infections, he turned back to Michael, who had already hopped down from the exam table and was looking much happier now that he no longer felt the need to keep up a macho front worthy of his namesake and hero. “And no swimming, you hear me? Not until those ears are completely cleared up.”
At that, his mother gave a gasp and dusted her son’s shoulder with her glancing swat. “Michael! You been swimming in that filthy river again? After I done told you? Didn’t I tell you stay away from that filthy water? What am I gonna do with you, boy?” She turned eyes glistening with hopelessness to Ethan. “I’m sorry, Doctor, but I got to work, I can’t watch him all the time. My sister Tamara, she supposed to watch him days, but she got the baby… It wasn’t so bad when he was in school, but now, with summer vacation and him home all day…”
Ethan nodded in automatic sympathy as he drew aside the exam room curtain; it was a story he’d heard many times before, one that unfortunately he had no answer for.
Just outside the curtain the woman stopped, turned abruptly and asked, “So, how much I owe you?”
It caught Ethan by surprise; he was already moving on, his mind leaping ahead to other things—the afternoon’s schedule, Ruthie’s lovelife, the evening’s four-to-midnight EMS ride-along. He turned back with a frown, poking absently at his lab coat pocket. “There’s no charge, ma’am, this is a free clinic.”
But the woman—Ethan glanced now at the chart, searching for her name…Louise, that was it, Louise Parker—drew herself up, somehow seeming inches taller. And in the proud lifting of her chin, reminded Ethan suddenly and for the first time of her son.
“Uh-uh—I got me a job, I been offa welfare for a year, now. I ain’t no freeloader. Michael and me, we pay our own way.”
Ethan glanced imploringly at Mrs. Schmidt, who had heard the exchange and was watching with great interest from her cubbyhole behind the reception counter. The woman drew a folded bill from the pocket of her faded jeans and thrust it at him. “Here—it’s all I got right now. If it’s not enough I’ll give you the rest next time I come. Let’s go, Michael.”
Speechless, Ethan watched Louise Parker and her son until the clinic’s front door had closed with a click behind them. Then he unfolded the bill. “My God,” he whispered, showing it to Mrs. Schmidt. “Twenty dollars—I’ll bet that’s a lot of money to her.”
“Probably.” As she went back to her books Mrs. Schmidt added in a musing tone, “That is one lucky little boy, you know that? With a mother like that, he might actually have a chance.”
Across the street from what had once been the South Church Street Fire Station, a thin black woman hurried along the sweltering sidewalk. So preoccupied was she with the scolding she was administering to the small boy dressed in baggy clothes and a backward baseball cap shuffling along beside her that she failed to notice a similarly dressed youth—this one Caucasian and of indeterminable gender—until they had all but collided.
“Michael!” The woman’s sharp whisper accompanied a light swat to the sagging seat of the boy’s trousers. “What you doin’, boy? Mind your manners! Say ‘excuse me.”’
“’Scuse me,” the boy dutifully mumbled, just as the “youth” was muttering, in a voice several tones deeper than her own distinctive contralto, “No, no, that’s okay—my fault. I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
The woman had done a double take and was now regarding the youth with an appraising stare, taking in the pale hue of her skin, the mirrored sunglasses, the New York Yankees logo on her baseball cap. “Hey,” she demanded on a rising note of incredulity, “you lost?”
Safe in her disguise, Phoenix reached out to give the bill of the little boy’s baseball cap a tug—why, she didn’t know, she normally had little use for children. “Nah,” she said with a wry smile, “not exactly. I was just looking for something…a place I used to know.”
“Yeah, well…” Looking extremely doubtful, the woman was edging away from her now, hands protectively on the child’s shoulders. “If I was you, I’d be askin’ Father Frank.”
“Who?”
“You know—the priest? Over there at St Jude’s.” She pointed, then hurried off in the opposite direction, calling back over her shoulder, “He can probably help you.” But she sounded, Joanna thought, as if in her opinion any white person dumb enough to be walking around alone in that neighborhood was most likely beyond help. She wondered if the woman knew St. Jude was the patron saint of lost causes.
Half a block down the street in the direction the woman had indicated squatted the ugly redbrick pile trimmed in white that housed the rectory of St. Jude’s Catholic Church. Next to it on the corner, the church itself—for which the street had been named nearly a century before—was only a slightly more graceful edifice, brightened somewhat by a Victorian abundance of stone trim and stained glass windows. On a tiny patch of grass tucked between the two, a stocky man dressed in black bermuda shorts and a white T-shirt had paused in his task of manhandling an old-fashioned push lawn mower in order to watch the exchange. Now he came toward Joanna, wiping sweat from his face with the sleeve of his T-shirt.
“Can I help you?”
Joanna hesitated. Normally she had no more use for priests than she did for children. But the man’s eyes were kind. “Maybe,” she said grudgingly, and jerked her head toward the street. “Didn’t there used to be a firehouse around here somewhere?”
The priest smiled. “That’s right—that’s it over there, across the street. Used to be the old Church Street station. They moved it a few years ago—three blocks over, on Franklin. Got too small, the street too crowded, I guess. Anyway, they’ve got a big new station over there—police, fire and EMS, all in one building. Go back down a block, then over three—you can’t miss it.” He paused, liquid dark eyes narrowing with concern. “Is everything okay? Anything I can do for you? You need to use the phone—”
Joanna shook her head. Then, for reasons she couldn’t begin to understand, heard herself explain, “I used to live around here—years ago. I was just wondering…” She paused and drew a careful breath, released it in a soft laugh. “I guess things have changed quite a bit.”
“Yes,
