Free Grace Grows by Shelle Sumners

in between the last time and the next time. More weeks. Months, even.
    He knocked again. I crept to the door and peeked out the peephole. The top of his head was right there. He must have been leaning against the door.
    “Grace?”
    I stayed very quiet.
    “Shit,” he said, and moaned. Yep, hungover.
    Finally, he shuffled away, down the stairs, without ever walking the dogs.
    I couldn’t give him more than a few minutes to clear out of the vicinity, or I was going to be late for work. I grabbed Big Green and headed out at 8:15, hoping he’d gone in a different direction.
    But there he was, right in front of my building. Flat on his back, the bottoms of his black Converse high-tops peeking out among the feet of the five or six people huddled around him.
    “Oh God!” I pushed through to him, knelt, and grabbed his shoulders. “Ty!”
    He groaned.
    “He just sat down on the ground and keeled over,” said the guy with blond dreds who was squatting beside me.
    “Tyler! Wake up!”
    He obliged me by coming to, blinking at me, grimacing, and rolling onto his side in a fetal position. “ Shit , Grace!”
    “What happened?”
    “It fucking hurts!”
    “What hurts?”
    “I’m fucking dying!”
    “You’d better get him to a hospital,” said an old lady carrying a Chihuahua and a Fairway bag.
    “Right.” I groped around in Big Green for my cell.
    “Don’t wait for an ambulance,” the dreds guy said, getting up. “Get a cab to take you to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt.”
    “Right! Good idea,” I said. The guy was already at the curb, his arm in the air. A taxi pulled over.
    “Ty.” I pulled on his arms. “Get up. We’re going to the hospital.”
    He was moaning, dead weight. I couldn’t move him.
    “Ty, please. You have to get up. Hold on to me.”
    The dreds guy, the cabdriver, and Salvatore, our street-corner Louis Vuitton handbag-and-used-books vendor, helped me get him in the backseat of the cab.
    Ty leaned heavily against me, eyes closed, face tight with suffering.
    “Hold on.” I held his hand firmly and tried to sound confident. “We’ll be there in a minute. You’re going to be okay.”
    I think I made the wrong career choice. It seems like emergency room workers have way more fun. Every time anyone came through the swinging doors that led into the emergency inner sanctum, I could hear people laughing and whooping it up. Some guy was taking orders for a Starbucks run and wow! Are those people caffeinated. Meanwhile, my friend was lying curled up on his side across three of the vinyl waiting room chairs, pale, sweating, wincing with every breath. It was half an hour before a nurse invited us into the triage room.
    He told her that the pain in his abdomen had started at around one a.m. and had grown steadily worse. It felt like being stabbed with needles. And he needed to throw up, but couldn’t.
    He had a fever. “Probably a virus,” the nurse said. “Go back to the waiting room and finish getting him registered. We’ll call you.”
    “Whatever it is, he passed out from the pain,” I said. “Please, how soon can he see a doctor?”
    She smiled like she hated me and all of my kind. “We’ll try to get him seen as soon as we can.”
    As gently as possible, I helped him settle back onto his improvised chaise lounge.
    “Ty,” I said, “I’m going to get your ID and your insurance card out of your wallet, okay?”
    His face was buried in his arm, his answer unintelligible.
    I slid his wallet out of its niche in the back right pocket of his jeans. It was worn, brown leather, warm with his body heat.
    “I’m looking in your wallet now, Ty.” I did not want to look in his wallet.
    Pennsylvania driver’s license. Frayed Social Security card.
    Photographs: A graduation portrait of a scowling, red-haired girl. Bogue, kneeling on a playing field in his football uniform.
    A small stack of Ty’s business cards, printed with a recent, brooding publicity photo on one side, his contact info on the