Free Home Another Way by Christa Parrish Page A

her touch up several times a day.” He cleared his throat, a gloppy, guttural haw. “I thought you were leaving.”
    “Change of plans,” I said, wringing my fingers in my lap.
    I looked around the room. Cheap paneling, shabby brown carpet, and none of the generic pastel landscapes expected in doctors’ offices. The exam table was brown, too, and the synthetic cover had cracked and been taped several times.
    “I need a job. You don’t even have to pay me.”
    “An altruist. I’m shocked.”
    “I’ll go insane if I don’t have something to kill time through the winter.”
    “The diner might be hiring.”
    “Heck, no,” I gagged.
    “I’m joking. I do have something for you. The winter weather is hard on many of my patients, and I have some who need to be looked in on more frequently than I have the time for. I’ll give you a hundred dollars a week to do it.”
    “Do what, exactly? I don’t want to be emptying bedpans.”
    “Visit folks. Talk to them for an hour or so. Make sure they’re eating, and that their heat works. That sort of thing.”
    “You’re talking companion. Not nurse.”
    “Yep. Be here tomorrow at nine, and dress warm.”
    I was gone before Patty and her big ears returned.

chapter FIFT EEN
    I pulled in front of Doc’s office at twenty-eight minutes after nine. He was waiting for me in the Jeep, engine on.
    “You’re late,” he said.
    I yawned. “Sorry.”
    “I bet,” Doc said, skidding onto the road. “We’ll go north today. Start with Ben Harrison and his wife, Rabbit.”
    “As in bunny?”
    “Ben has a diabetic ulcer on his foot and can’t hunt. It’s killing them to depend on someone else. Normally, he hunts year round. She has a vegetable garden in the summer, and jars the surplus for the winter.”
    Pine trees packed the woods on each side, crowding the road, which now rose headlong into the sky. Pressure swelled in my ears. I pinched my nose and blew.
    “There’s gum in the glove box,” Doc said.
    Cramming two sticks of Juicy Fruit in my mouth, I balled the foil wrappers in my palm and flicked them onto the floor with several others. Doc took a left, and another, and then turned right at a junkyard. Weeds, sinewy and taut, lashed hunks of rusted metal to the snow. A school bus tilted drunkenly on two flat tires amidst the scrap heaps.
    “I won’t remember how to get here,” I told him.
    “I’ll draw you a map.”
    The Jeep lurched through the woods. I rested my forehead against the window. Condensation bloomed around my nose and mouth, and I closed my eyes, dozing until Doc nudged my shoulder. We were parked in front of a ramshackle shed; it listed to the right, one wall bowed like a hunchback. The lone window was broken, with several layers of green garbage bags taped over it. The shingles rippled under a moldy nylon tarp. Doc wrapped his scarf over his ears and climbed out of the car.
    “Where’s the house?” I asked, briskly rubbing my face to wake up.
    “This is it. Grab that bag on the back seat.”
    He knocked once and opened the door. I followed, carrying the grocery sack, bracing for some horrible stench or towers of empty cat food cans. Instead, the one-room home was tiny but neat, except for the tangle of blankets on top of a mattress. Two bentwood chairs and a potbellied stove filled the remaining space. The floor was dirt and recently swept, broom bristle lines still visible.
    A sun-dried woman sat in one chair, sewing a patch on a corduroy jacket. Her hair hung to her waist in two stringy, uneven horsetails.
    “Doc, his foot ain’t no better,” she said.
    Barely glancing at me, she crossed the room in four strides, peeling back the pile of blankets to reveal a bearded man. He moaned. “Get off me, woman.”
    She slapped the top of his head. “Hush. The doc be here.”
    The man propped himself on his elbows. “Oh, Doc, I ain’t going nowhere with you. You can take my leg off right here, but if you tries to get me to a hospital, I’ll