Mrs. Sweet sat in the emergency room’s waiting area at Saint Catherine Hospital and read the National Enquirer. Stuffing one leg behind the other, chewing her mint gum at a ferocious pace, she ignored the muted sounds of heels clicking down the hallways and the receptionist’s monotonous, clicking voice.

Angelina Jolie TELLS ALL! the headlines screamed. Donald Trump Infested With Rare Parasite! Doctors Confirm—“They will make him a vegetable in six months!” SEX, LIES, DRUGS! CUSTODY BATTLES! Turn to page 6 for the details!

So Mrs. Sweet turned to page 6 for the details, but she couldn’t keep her mind on the stuff. The blur of sex, drugs, lies, and custody battles swam in her head. She wondered if she dared excuse herself to go to the bathroom again. Not that she needed to use it. She just wanted to close herself off from the world and rest her head against a cool, lifeless porcelain wall. Wanted to pretend she was in a bathroom anywhere else in the world—not in Saint Catherine Hospital. But the nurses might notice and ask her if she had a bladder infection. Nurses noticed things like that, she knew. Next thing, they’d be whisking her off on a stretcher to extract God knows what body fluids from her before locking her in a torture chamber all night…

Sighing, she dug through her pea-green purse and pulled out a detective novel called His Mistress’s Secret Closet. The fact that the story was mostly sex scenes revolted her after a few minutes, and she turned her attention to the television, which showed a man shooting golf balls like this was the most important thing in the world. Then the door opened. In walked a blank-faced young woman, holding a coughing baby like a bag of bricks. With another burst of cold wind, in walked a frantic twenty-something guy with red eyes.

“I’m in pain, I’m in pain!” he yelped like a puppy dog.

The receptionist didn’t look up. “How bad is it on a scale of one to ten?”

“It’s fifty!”

“Sir, our scale only goes up to ten. One means barely a twinge of pain, and ten means how it would feel if I put you through a woodchipper. Do you feel like you’ve been put through a woodchipper? Or should we bring out a woodchipper to see if your pain level assessment is correct?”

The man bit his lip. “Ok, it’s more like an eight,” he muttered. “But take a look at this toe!” He pulled off his disgusting shoes and socks and propped his foot on the desk.

The receptionist gagged. “Sir, we are going to have to request that you put your foot down and please be seated.”

“But look at my toe! See, it’s all swollen along the edges. My dad died of a condition called Roger’s Toe. This is how it looked for him. He didn’t know he had it until he stubbed his toe against his BMW while painting the garage.”

“Who is idiotic enough to stub their toe against their car while painting the garage?” the receptionist said. She carefully avoided looking at the foot.

“He also inhaled paint fumes!” the man persisted. He was getting really worked up. “First his toe turned red, then sort of a pinkish color, then green, then blue, then purple, or was it indigo? Oh, and then it turned—”

“In case you’re just begging to be escorted out of here, nobody in this waiting room wants to hear about the colors of your dad’s toe. You’re just making up a whole imaginary gol-darned rainbow if you ask me.”

“Then it, like, exploded! All over the garage! My mother and I are still trying to clean the bloodstains out of the garage.”

Now the receptionist looked puzzled. “So you never painted the garage?”

The man took this as a small piece of encouragement. He thought the receptionist was on to him. He put his shoe back on and leaned seductively against the desk. “What’s your name, babe?”

“Jill. Please be seated and a doctor will be with you shor—”

“Well, we should hang out sometime. Are you on Snap Chat? My username is Dingdong4.0”

“Will you just shut up and go to your seat or will I have to bring in that woodchipper like I threatened?”

“I’m going to sue you guys!” the man gloated. “You’re the rudest hospital folks on the planet. I bet you actually killed my dad when he came in here with Roger’s Toe.”

“Excuse me,” Mrs. Sweet said, getting so interested in the conversation that she had to interject, “What on earth is Roger’s Toe? I went to nursing school, and I never heard of it before.”

“That’s because it was named after my dad. He was the first confirmed case. Hey, lady, do you think Jill and I should hang out?”

Mrs. Sweet surrendered and retreated into her novel like a bird returning to its nest. Hello, anxiety. My old friend. Sure, take up my thoughts!

She was a shy, dweebish, middle-aged person, only four-foot seven, and toothpick-skinny. Cold weather and strangers seriously disturbed her, and she didn’t leave her house if she didn’t have to. Besides, she had an intense phobia of blood, fainted at the sight of it, in fact. Doctors and nurses, all medical things, really, were intensely repulsive to her. She had once refused to go to a doctor when she was practically dying in agony from a kidney stone. It was against her ethics to seek unnecessary help, and besides, Mrs. Sweet had a strange theory that all illnesses would go away if they were just ignored.

“Ignore an illness and it will get better nine times out of ten,” she was apt to say. “Now doctors, they just kill you. They kill you so they can afford their yachts and Bermuda vacations. My friend Doris, now, she had just a tiny little cough for ages, but she was as healthy as a pig until she went in to have the cough evaluated on a whim. And two weeks later—wham—she was dead of lung cancer. I never saw a person deteriorate faster in my life. You’d have to be a fool to not think the hospital killed her. If she’d ignored that cough, she’d still be here!”

It could be argued that Mrs. Sweet’s disgust about medical settings stemmed from her failing nursing school as a twenty-one-year-old. But you could just as easily argue that it was from watching her mother shrivel up and die of dementia like a piece of rotten fruit, or watching her father go into a diabetic coma and die steadily for months, or watching her friend Doris die of lung cancer. Mrs. Sweet’s psychoanalyst had long ago given up trying to find out why.

So what dastardly emergency drove Mrs. Sweet out in the wind and cold of December to Saint Catherine Hospital? Which of her loved ones had fallen ill? It must be something frightful, unspeakable. Something too bad to dwell on.

The man with the hurt toe kept wandering around the E.R. Every five seconds, he had to remember to grab his toe and scream bloody murder, making all eyes turn to him once more.

“Drug-seeker,” the young mom whispered to Mrs. Sweet. “They always help the drug-seekers first. Those noisy bastards. Like I haven’t been up all night with this screaming bundle…”

“Shut up,” Mrs. Sweet said, more sharply than was usual for her. “Why don’t they just hand out free drugs? Then they wouldn’t have to be criminals. I think I’d be a lot happier if I did some good old booger sugar once in a while.”

The young man let out a shrieking laugh. “Booger sugar! Lady, tell me some more drug slang you know!”

Mrs. Sweet was mortified at herself for talking, as usual. She tried once more, unsuccessfully, to read her novel.

The Sweet family lived in a one-story house in the cold, bleary town of White Falls, Michigan. The family consisted of Mrs. Zachary Sweet (her real name was Joanne, but she only thought of herself in relation to her husband), Mr. Zachary Sweet, teenage daughter number one, and teenage daughter number two. There was a young adult son, but he was no good and had run off to live at a commune in New Mexico. He was part of an obscure religion called the People of the Moon Peace Temple. The goings-on at this temple were so secretive that the son couldn’t write letters often.

The teenage daughters were so nondescript and skinny and stringy-haired and nervous that their names slipped past the minds of everyone who asked them. At sixteen and fourteen, they both had cases of the teenage blues and, in their crabbiness, hid away from the world. Especially the younger girl, Lenore Mae. She had recently become a religious fundamentalist and sent away to the Institute of Basic Life Principles for literature to read. Lenore had asked her mother to buy her only long skirts, and then, after a time of reading and indoctrinating herself, asked to drop out of school so she could get married. Her mother refused. After a long time fighting, she agreed to put Lenore in a strict private Christian academy, but only because her grandfather had just died and left the Sweets all his money. If Lenore wasn’t such a good girl, you might have suspected her of poisoning her grandpa for this purpose.

“Joanne Sweet?”

She could not bring herself to stand up and walk past that door.

The doctor squinted at his clipboard and repeated her name.

 “I’m the patient’s mother. She came here without telling me and I had to find it out from the radio.”

“My goodness,” said the young man with the hurt toe. “Your daughter’s been in a car accident, overdosed on drugs, or went into septic shock, and all you care about is that she didn’t tell you first? I’m glad you’re not my mother.”

Mrs. Sweet shot him a dirty look. “You can keep your opinions to yourself, young man.”

“We don’t have all day, Joanne!” The doctor was getting really irritated now.

“Yeah, and some of us here have Roger’s toe! Doctor, take a look at this, won’t you? Hey, Doctor, at least my good-for-nothing dad wasn’t as good-for-nothing as she is. Just listen to her! How dare her daughter not tell her before finding herself in a medical emergency! What an ungrateful brat, right? Right? Hey, you, receptionist lady, don’t you think she’s the Mother of the Year?”

Jill the receptionist said, “Sir, are you sure you can’t see your primary care physician? It’s getting to that time of the night where we’ll be clogged up with drunks and homeless people, and you might risk getting robbed. Besides, they’ll probably be after those tasty yummy painkillers that you want.”

“I. Have. Roger’s. Toe! Just you try living through the agony of having Roger’s Toe! Just you try, babe!”

The doctor’s expression clearly said, Joanne Sweet, if you don’t come back to see your daughter right this minute, I will slam this door on your little finger and give you something to cry about.

Mrs. Sweet followed the doctor as though she were in a dream. Soon she found herself in a room with hissing overhead lights, a spinning chair, an ink pen with an oversized flower on the end, ceiling tiles that looked like you could jab through them with a pencil.

“How is she?”

Mrs. Sweet’s voice suddenly became the voice of a child trying to wake from a nightmare. The child who’s waiting for reassurance that the monster under the bed isn’t real. The seconds clicked past, and she was aware of nothing but his scrubs, his small superior smile, his paperwork. She felt like she should speak up and say something—she was the minor patient’s parent, after all—but she felt utterly helpless before this white snowy mountain of bad news.

“Does that make sense?” he asked her, after he was done talking.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Sweet, her voice way too high and squeaky. “That makes perfect, perfect sense! Oh, Doctor, handsome Doctor, wonderful sweet Doctor, it makes per-fect sense!”