A nurse making rounds paused next to me, gauging the level of anger in the alcove, then shook her head and moved on.

“I don’t care about the stupid goddamn ball game!” Sandra’s voice rose. “It’s April’s ticket to college, you-you loser. You know damned well she can’t go on your paycheck. I’m not having her do like me, spend her life married to some creep who can’t keep his pants zipped, working her life away at By-Smart because she can’t do any better. Look at me, I look as old as your mother, and talk about the High-and-Mighty Mother of God, that’s how she looks on you, and me, I’m supposed to get down on my knees and slobber thanks because I married you, and you can’t even support your own kid.”

“What do you mean, I can’t support her? Fuck you, bitch! Did she ever go to school hungry or-”

“Did you even listen to the doctor? It will cost a hundred thousand dollars to fix her heart, and then the drugs, and the insurance pays ten thousand dollars of it? Where are you going to find the money, tell me that? The money we could’ve been saving if you hadn’t spent it on drinks for the boys, and the whores you screw around with, and-”

Bron’s head seemed to swell with anger. “I will find the money it takes to look after April! You cannot stand there telling me I don’t love my own daughter.”

The woman with the small child approached them timidly. “Can you be a little quieter, please? You’re making my baby cry, shouting like that.”

Sandra and Bron looked at her; the little girl on the IV was crying, silent hiccupping sobs that were more unnerving than a loud howl. Bron and Sandra looked away, which is how Bron caught sight of me.

“It’s goddamn Tori Warshawski. What the fuck were you doing, pushing my girl so hard she went and collapsed?” His voice rose to a roar that brought aides and parents scurrying to the hall.

“Hi, Bron, hi, Sandra, how’s she doing?” I asked.

Sandra turned away from me, but Bron erupted from the alcove, pushing me so hard he flung me against a wall. “You hurt my girl! I warned you, Warshawski, I warned you if you messed with April you’d answer to me!”

People watched in horror as I carefully righted myself. The pain coursing down my left arm brought tears to my eyes, but I blinked them back. I wasn’t going to get into a fight with him, not in a hospital, not with my left arm in a sling, and, anyway, not with a guy so worried and helpless that he had to pick a fight with anyone who looked at him crossways. But I wasn’t going to let him see me cry, either.

“Yes, I heard you. I can’t remember what you said you’d do if I saved her life.”

Bron pounded a fist against his palm. “If you saved her life. If you saved her life, you can kiss my ass.”

I turned to Sandra. “I heard you say it was her heart. What happened? I never saw her weak or short of breath at practice.”

“You’d say that, wouldn’t you?” Sandra said. “You’d say anything to protect your butt. She has something wrong with her heart, it’s something she was born with, but you ran her too hard, that’s why she collapsed.”

I felt cold with a fear that Bron hadn’t inspired in me: these words sounded like a prelude to a lawsuit. April’s treatment would cost more than a hundred thousand dollars; they needed money; they could sue me. My pockets weren’t deep, but they sure hung lower than the Czernins’.

“If she was born with the condition, it could have happened anytime, anywhere, Sandra,” I said, trying to keep my voice level. “What do the doctors say they can do to treat her?”

“Nothing. Nothing but rest unless we can come up with the money to pay their bills. All the blacks, they have it easy, just show their welfare cards and their kids get whatever they need, but people like us, people who work hard all the time, what do we have to show for it?”

Sandra glared up the hall at the woman with the small child, who happened to be black, as if the four-year-old had designed the managed care companies that decreed what medical care Americans could get. A nurse who’d come out of one of the patient rooms stepped forward, trying to intervene, but the Czernins were in their own private universe, the world of anger, and no one else could get into it with them. The nurse went back to whatever she’d been doing, but I stayed on the battlefield.

“And I’m married to Mr. Wonderful here, who hasn’t been home one night all week and then acts like he’s Saint Joseph, the greatest father of all time.” Sandra turned her bitter face back to Bron. “I’m surprised you even know your own daughter’s name, you sure as hell forgot her birthday this year, out with that English bitch, or was it Danuta Tomzak from Lazinski’s bar?”

Bron grabbed Sandra’s thin shoulders and started shaking her. “I do love my daughter, you damn cunt, you will not say different, not here, not anywhere. And I can get the fucking money to pay for her heart. You tell that SOB doctor not to move her, not to check her out of the hospital, I’ll have the money for him by Tuesday, easy.”

He stormed down the corridor and slammed his way through a swinging door that led to a stairwell. Sandra’s mouth was a thin bitter line.

“Mary had the Prince of Peace, I get the Prince of Pricks.” She turned her scowl on me. “Is he going to ask that English woman he’s been screwing for money?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I don’t know if she has any.”

And who forks over a hundred grand to the daughter of a man she cares about only as a good story to tell her friends back home? I didn’t say it-Sandra was only clutching at straws; she didn’t have any sense right now, no sense of what was possible and what wasn’t.

“You said the insurance would cover only ten thousand dollars. Is that your insurance?”

She shook her head and said through tight, thin lips, “I can’t get coverage because I only work thirty-four hours a week. By-Smart says that isn’t full-time work, it has to be forty hours a week. So Bron buys the insurance, for him and April, we decided we couldn’t afford to cover me, and when the hospital, when they called the company yesterday, it turns out that that’s all the coverage she gets for being sick and we pay, Mother of God, we pay two thousand six hundred dollars a year. If I’d known, I’d’ve been putting all that money in a savings account for April.”

“What is it that’s really wrong with April?” I asked.

Sandra twisted her hands together. “I don’t know. The doctors use fancy language so you won’t know if they’re doing the right thing for your kid or not. Were you working her too hard because she’s mine?”

I wished I’d listened to Mr. Contreras and stayed home. All I wanted right now was to crawl into a cave and sleep until spring.

“Can we talk to a doctor? If I understand what the diagnosis is, maybe I can help find treatment.” I was thinking of my friend Lotty Herschel, who’s a surgeon at Beth Israel Hospital on Chicago ’s far North Side. Lotty treats her share of indigent patients; she might know how to help the Czernins dance around the insurance system.

“She fainted once, last summer, when she’d been at a basketball camp, but I didn’t think anything of it, girls faint all the time, I know I did when I was her age. I wanted her to have every opportunity, I wasn’t going to have you lord it over my kid the way you do over me.”

I blinked, reeling under the flow of words and the contradictory ideas jostling for airspace. I was about to utter a reflexive protest, that I didn’t lord it over her, but when I remembered our history together I felt myself blushing. That night just before the homecoming dance, if I could call up one evening of my life to do differently that would be the one, unless it was the time I’d snuck a pint of whiskey from Lazinski’s the night my mother died-enough. I had enough bad memories to make me squirm all day if I dwelt on them.

The nurse who’d tried to intervene in Sandra and Bron’s fight was still lingering nearby. She agreed to page a doctor to come to April’s room to talk to the family. While we waited, I crossed the hall to April’s room. Sandra followed me without protest.