Part 6
By morning, Daniel had learned which wheel on Edith’s walker needed attention and how weak the county nurse wanted the coffee. The warming center smelled of wet clothes and scrambled eggs. Around him, the six Birch Lodge residents argued about who had kept everybody awake.
The walker brake took a few turns to put right. Afterward Daniel brought Henry’s used oxygen cylinder to the supply van, but the shaking started before he could take on another job. He returned to the chair where Mica was sleeping underneath, stretched out in full view.
Two days after the storm, Daniel went next door and found Walt squinting at hospital paperwork over the kitchen table. A new carbon monoxide detector stood nearby. Three people had separately forbidden him to use the workshop before it was repaired; none appeared to have persuaded him to fetch his glasses from beside the bed.
“Planning to read those from across the room?” Daniel asked, putting them down.
Walt put the glasses on. Mica sniffed his right boot, then rested her chin briefly on his knee. He started to touch her, saw her step back, and left his hand on the table instead.
“You’ve still got my glove,” he said.
“She’s looking after it.”
“I could’ve used that service before I lost it.”
Daniel poured the coffee and remained standing. Walt waited, looking through the glasses he’d just been given.
“I should’ve helped you,” Daniel said. “I could’ve driven. Made some of those calls.”
“You could have.”
The answer left him nowhere to go except on. “I’m sorry.”
Walt took a while folding the pages. “Next time, tell me what you’re up for. Don’t tell me I can’t ask.”
Daniel sat down. He wanted to explain the fatigue, the calls he wasn’t answering, how an ordinary request could feel like being asked to prove something. Walt already knew enough of that; Daniel reached for his cup instead.
When he went to the community center to give Erin his account of finding Walt, Janet showed him the route sheets preserved before Lakeshore could make corrections. Paige had saved the messages she’d sent about uncovered visits, along with management’s directions to close them at the end of the shift. The original scheduling data had been secured for review.
Russell Voss, Lakeshore’s local manager, was unloading oxygen cylinders nearby. Edith thanked him for changing her flat tire once, then asked why his company had recorded a visit to her house when no one came. He set the cylinder he was carrying into its rack.
“Two employees quit in December,” he said. “I was running dialysis trips myself. We asked for more hours, and the county kept sending the same answer.”
Janet stood at the table with the schedules. “We needed to know which visits you couldn’t cover.”
“I did report it. Your answer was a corrective-action notice. Losing the contract would’ve closed this branch. What were we supposed to do then?”
Janet didn’t dispute the notice. Daniel heard her acknowledge the slow response to requests for storm coverage and the reimbursement that hadn’t kept up with travel costs. Russell listened, one hand still on the rack, until Paige opened the blue folder against her chest.
“Those warnings weren’t vague,” Paige said. “I specifically asked about closing routes the county would see as finished. You said to do it and sort the records out the next day.”
“We were trying to get through the night.”
“You canceled the overtime at Birch Lodge.”
“I saw Tessa on the contact thread.”
Paige shook her head. “I was asking whether anybody had her number. She didn’t work for us anymore. That wasn’t a shift confirmation.”
June had called Tessa only after the scheduled aides failed to arrive. Nobody at Lakeshore had confirmed a replacement. Around the table, volunteers kept moving supplies; somebody needed Russell to shift a cylinder so a cart could get through.
Daniel remembered deleting his own appointment from the patient portal, the brief relief when it was gone from the calendar. He looked at the route sheets Janet had kept. Those boxes had helped determine whether someone would come looking for Edith.
Janet drew the papers together. “We’ll review the funding too. These visits still weren’t made.”
Russell said he wanted an attorney before giving a formal statement. Then he moved the cylinder and went back to unloading. Daniel stayed long enough to answer Erin’s questions about the workshop.
Janet began requiring a direct answer whenever a winter visit was missed or left incomplete. Other providers took over the people at greatest risk; the county and state would examine the billing alongside the actual service records. Paige handed over her saved messages and resigned. Daniel saw her three weeks later dispatching warming-center deliveries, holding each driver long enough to read the address back.
The review would continue into spring. Daniel heard the practical changes from Janet; he didn’t follow the case farther.
At home three weeks after the storm, Mica lay near his boots while he sorted the mail from the console. Elise’s latest figures put her eleven pounds above her starting weight. The rubbed skin around her neck had healed, and her blood work no longer showed the nutritional trouble found at the first visit.
Someone had posted a photograph of her with Walt’s glove. At the checkup, Daniel had complained about strangers describing her as a trained rescue dog.
“She knew the glove,” he’d told Elise. “It was the next yard.”
Elise had listened to Mica’s heart while he talked. When he finished, she asked how often food was turning up in his boots. He unfolded the feeding sheet, and they spent the rest of the visit going over what Mica was eating.
At the warming center, a dropped metal tray had been enough to undo a quiet afternoon. Later there was kibble in Daniel’s boot, and unfamiliar hands reaching overhead still made Mica shrink away. He waited until she slept to transfer the food into a container approved by Elise. It remained untouched overnight; breakfast, however, disappeared from the bowl.
Mica was quicker when something slipped from the mail he was sorting. By the time Daniel reached down, her teeth held a white envelope by its edge. She took it to the canvas daypack and released it there, as gently as a glove or scarf. Then she backed away, leaving Daniel looking at the damp corner beside the open bag.
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