“Do you have any medicine?”
Ray laughed, a low, knowing laugh, and Devon sighed.
“Forget it.” Starting for the door, he called over his shoulder, “I’ll be back in a bit.”
But at the drugstore, the pharmacist wouldn’t give him antibiotics, not unless she came in and saw the clinic doctor or brought a prescription. He almost didn’t sell Devon the Tylenol, pointed to the “no sales to minors” sign, but he must have noticed the look on Devon’s face.
“Give her some ice chips, too, and plenty of water,” the pharmacist said, ringing up the Tylenol. He was a big man, with giant frizzy sideburns and tiny rectangular glasses. “If she’s not better tomorrow, call me and I’ll see if we can get someone to go to the house. I know your Memaw doesn’t get out.”
“Thanks,” Devon said, and ran the ten blocks back to the house.
When he got back, Ray was gone, and T was on his cell phone on the back porch, yelling at someone. Devon tiptoed into the kitchen for a tall glass of water and plenty of ice, then down the hall to Memaw’s room.
“Thank you, honey,” Memaw said, when he got her upright and put the pills and the glass of ice water in her hands. A little watersloshed out and onto the bed, but she didn’t seem to notice. “You’re a good, good boy. Good like your mama.”
He slept in there that night, at the foot of her bed, reading his Bible for a long while.
Proverbs, mostly, and the psalms, and part of Kings, at one point. Psalm 28 was the one he read over and over. It was the one his Mama had read when she was so sick: “To you, O Lord, I call; my rock, be not deaf to me.” And later, “The Lord is my strength and my shield; in him my heart trusts, and I am helped.”
When he woke in the night to use the restroom, he felt Memaw’s forehead. Thank you, Jesus.
The fever had broken.
He looked down at the Bible in his hands and back at the woman, his only link to Mama, his own mama’s mama, there in the bed. What would happen to him if she got too sick, or worse—if she died? A rush of warmth hit him in the gut like a punch. He couldn’t stay with Uncle T. He’d run away before he’d let that happen.
But what else was there? Foster care? He’d had friends who were bounced around in the system, spit back out like unwanted rags. Shane and T.C. That girl Lily. Horror stories.
He sank to his knees.
Please, God. Please let Memaw be okay. I can’t go to foster care. Please—I’ll do anything.
But God didn’t answer.
CHAPTER 9
Rebecca
“With a master’s in journalism from New York University and a bachelor’s from Syracuse, now all the way from New York City to run theDahlia Weekly, please help me welcome Ms. Rebecca Chastain!”
Obligatory applause followed the gravelly voiced Rotary Club president’s introduction, and Rebecca rose from the round breakfast table in the Baptist church fellowship hall to make her way to the front of the room, stand before a neat brown podium. Stay confident. Reigning in her nerves, she shook the older man’s hand, then turned to smile at the room, the aroma of bacon and diner-style coffee so thick she could almost taste it. She searched the faces. Thirty-two of Dahlia’s best and brightest business and community leaders there before her, and not one of them seemed remotely interested in what she had to say. She felt like the new kid in school.
She cleared her throat, gave her warmest grin, and tried her best to calm the shaking her hands wanted to do. She clutched the edge of the podium.
“Thank you so much for having me, and onbehalf of theDahlia Weekly, I am grateful for your support of our newspaper institution and its critical role in this community.”
Her pat speech lasted fourteen minutes—the history of the paper, the new price increases, the focus on bigger and more important hard news over some of those mindless features that used to eat up the front page. Only she didn’t call them mindless. “Lighter” was the euphemism, and she inwardly applauded her tact. Everyone had loved Ron Stone, who’d been the editor since the eighties, but after he’d passed away and they’d hired that string of new editors, the paper had dwindled to a bunch of nothing, in Rebecca’s private opinion. The last editor had taken what was already bland and ho-hummed it to a state of near irrelevance. She only hoped this crowd would see her efforts for what they were: a true attempt to save the paper.
“You, in the gray? Mr. Collins, is it?” She gestured to the balding man on the far left with his hand raised. She was pretty sure he was Reynolds Collins, president of Dahlia First Bank.
“I appreciate what you are saying, Ms. Chastain,” he began in a slow drawl dripping with a healthy dose of fatherly patronization that made her wince, “and I’m sure it costs a lot of money to run your operation, but why take sections people love and cut them down to practically nothing? Like the high school sports section. My boys didn’t get their picture in the paper once this spring. I don’t know about the Big Apple, but that means a lot to us here in Dahlia. This town, and this Rotary Club, has a vested interest in what’s going on at that paper.”
She heard murmurs of agreement, and her heart thudded. Keep it together—they’re not the enemy. They don’t want to run you out of town. They only want a strong paper.
“You’re right—it does cost a lot to run a paper.” She made her voice as warm as she could. “We felt a six-page school sports section was a lot, so we’re trying two pages, tightening photos, untilwe can grow advertising and circulation to the point where it’s sustainable to run a bigger section.”
A neatly coiffed woman in a beige pantsuit lifted a finger.
“Marge Dawkins, president of the Dahlia Historical Society. I understand charging for lengthy obituaries. They can get tedious, and perhaps not as well read as other sections.” Her husky voice was gentle. “But I do question the wisdom of charging for birth announcements, which are short and, well, far more interesting. The last thing new parents need after an expensive birth is to have to shell out twenty-five dollars to have a new member of this town get proper recognition.”
