Chapter 47: Beside Her

Evan was taking a retired cook's blood pressure when the man with the phone came up the stairs. One sixty-eight over ninety-four. He wrote it on the intake sheet anyway. The stairwell had gone loud, and he wanted one thing in the room to be finished. Three days after the flood, the community room above Jackson Street held eleven cots, a refrigerator of insulin from four displaced households, and Linda, who had appointed herself inventory. Lan altered donated trousers at a folding table. Kenji sorted meals by allergy. Below the south windows, pumps still pushed brown water out of basements, and each time an engine caught, Evan's body supplied the van rolling onto its roof. Behind the nearest screen, Su's pulse moved under his own. Slow and uneven. The lingzhi bond had never learned privacy. "Is she in there?" Tape stopped tearing. A chair scraped once and nobody moved it…