I couldn’t imagine that. Or could, but didn’t want to. The desperation was not unknown.
“That’s the men,” she said. “The women play it smart, they’ll go into their exam room and duck out with her prescription pad before Mom can get in there to see them.”
Emmy had one hand up to her mouth. I remembered how she used to bite her fingernails till they bled. June painted them with iodine to get her to stop. I had nothing to offer her now.
“Mom says half these people don’t know they’re addicted. They took what some doctor told them to, and now they’re fiending and don’t really know what it is. All they know is, Mom cut off their drugs and now they feel like they’re dying. So why won’t she help them?”
All this was making me hanker to go take more pills. Sick as that is. I wondered if Emmy knew how deep I was in. But she was wrapped up in her own shit. She said in Knoxville, June could refer these patients someplace for help, but here their insurance only covered the pills.
“You all never should have moved back. If things are so much better in Knoxville.”
“No, she was miserable in that hospital. Their head physician was this city guy from Johns Hopkins that treated the local nursing staff like they were half-wits.”
I’d forgotten about that. He called her Loretta Lynn. Emmy’s chair stopped rocking.
“Anyway, Mom says home is home. If people are in trouble, it’s where she needs to be.” Emmy put her face to the blanket, wiping her nose. I hadn’t known she was crying.
“Sucks, though,” I said. “She doesn’t deserve people going off at her like that.”
“Probably she’s called Hammer to come over again. To protect her from getting murdered. He’s probably there right now.” She started crying then with no bother to hide it.
“What happened? With Hammer. You two were almost engaged there for a minute.”
Bad move, Emmy went full waterworks. I said I was sorry, but she kept saying she was a terrible person. Over and over. I told her to stop it, she was a queen bee. Same as June.
“No, I’m not.” She was doing that gasping thing that happens after crying. Mrs. Peggot used to call it getting the snubs. After a minute she asked if I knew Martha Coldiron.
“You mean Hot Topic?” Even in the dark, I could tell I’d said the wrong thing. “Sorry, I forgot her name. Yeah, I know her. Maggot’s barber.”
“Martha got pregnant.”
“Jesus. Maggot wasn’t any party to that, was he?”
Emmy blew air out her lips.
“Okay, not Maggot. So what’s she going to do? Marry the guy?”
“She despises the guy. She wouldn’t tell me who, just that he’s a bastard and now she had evil inside her like Rosemary’s baby. She said if she couldn’t get rid of it, she’d kill herself.”
“Man alive. How’d you get mixed up with this?”
“She’s at the house a lot. Maggot might be her only friend. I told her Mom could refer her to a free clinic and not be judgmental because it’s her job. But Martha thinks if one adult knows something, they all will. Her dad finding out would be the end of her life.”
“Damn. She’s up a creek.”
“It’s called getting an abortion. I drove her to Knoxville so nobody would find out.” Her chair started rocking again, in an agitated way. “Demon, I’m a horrible person. The sooner you realize that, the better off you’ll be.”
“Why? Because of Martha’s baby?”
“No. That was probably the nicest thing I’ve done for anybody in ages.”
“So?” Weirdly, I thought of my snake bracelet. Wondered if she still had it on her ankle.
“So, I lied to Mom. She thought we went to Knoxville for a Kathy Mattea concert. I lie to Mom all the time. Me being here right now is lying to Mom. She hates Fast Forward.”
“That’s just June being June. She’s always treated you like a china doll.”
“No. It’s him. It’s not like she hates all guys, Demon. She likes you. She loves Hammer Kelly. I broke up with him because he’s too good for me. I didn’t deserve him.”
I knew Emmy’s moods. She would just have to talk herself out of this one. She told me June was worried to death about Maggot, no news there. But Emmy knew more than I did about where he was getting his crank. He was more into meth than oxy. We still talked like that, at the time, about what we were “into.” Like it was a hobby. She told me things I didn’t want to know, like who he was having sex with, to procure. My brain slammed the door on that one. Jesus. Maggot. This overgrown kid that barely had outgrown Legos and Avengers.