“Don’chu worry ‘bout me, Mona,” Adele said as her cousin shuffled along arm-in-arm next to her. “Go on ‘n’ park that car--I'll make it just fine.” “You hush, not another word,” Mona said. All it’d take is one good fall, and Dellie’d be in the hospital indefinitely. No need for two Rosalinds to be holed up in that place at the same time. “Idn’t but two steps to that chair in there and I mean ta see ya to it.” The two old women made progress at a painful pace, and the Chevy coughed and idled under the Emergency Room entrance awning. “Anyone ever tell you you’re stubborn, Adele?” “Never have,” Adele chuckled deep in her chest. A nurse met the pair at the door, and Adele recognized him right away. “Well, Miss Adele!” He was a handsome young man with a clear complexion and white, white teeth. “You in bad shape so soon?” he asked. “Weren’t you just here last week?” “I was,” Adele said. “Ta see Dr. Dean. I had an appointment.” The nurse took Adele’s other side, and he and Mona led her to a comfortable chair in the waiting room. “Where’re ya hurtin’?” he asked, gently helping her seat herself. “Hurtin’? Oh, no, Louis--not me. I’m not here ta see Dr. Dean. My great-granddaughter’s up there havin’ a baby.” “Is that so!” Louis shouted. “Well, Congratulations! You’re gonna be a great-great-grandmother now! Shouldn’t there be some kinda award for that?” Adele chuckled again. “I reckon there should be, I reckon so.” She smiled, and the soft wrinkles around her lips stretched thin as rice paper. “Well, let me get a wheelchair, Miss Adele, and I’ll take you up there myself. How’s that sound?” “Sounds fine.” “Oh goodness, Dellie. I forgot the car’s runnin’.” Mona took off back toward the door. Adele sat alone in the waiting room for several minutes. How times change. Hospitals were an entirely different place to be than they were in ’28. On the day Adele dragged herself into the Emergency Room, alone and in agony, patients crowded the chairs, protectively guarding their wounds or trying to suppress their raking, dry coughs. They sat apathetically together like half-dead flowers in an abandoned flowerbed. Now, there was a television on in the corner, playing shows no one was there to see, shows Adele couldn’t rightly understand. Seventy years ago, the blue-gray paint on the walls looked like cracking eggshells, cold, confining, and deftly sentencing. Now, the walls were a pleasant shade of deep burgundy, and several moderately sized paintings of egrets and peacocks and swans hung on all sides. The only thing that hadn’t changed was the slick tile floors, waxed and buffed to a blinding gleam. And when a person walked across it, their shoes squeaked, no matter what kind of shoes they were. And then, there was the manner in which Adele was received. It wasn’t time that robbed Adele’s memory of the nurse’s name who did not even both to inquire Adele of hers. Adele never knew the woman’s name. What she remembered was the sour curl of her lip, the perplexed sigh that no one was there to accompany the laboring woman. What Adele remembered was the woman’s cold, cold wake in which Adele followed as the nurse led her to the furthermost corner of the furthermost ward. Those times were long before Louis had ever been a thought in his mother and daddy’s minds. Yet God saw it fitting to bring Adele full circle, beyond her most lasting moment of weakness, to a time when a nurse was a man who knew Adele by her first name and would take it upon himself to see her up four stories in the building to her great-granddaughter. And there, Everest, bless her heart, would not sting the way Adele did.