So they walked. Or rather, they carried her between them — Tiny on one side, Doc on the other, her arms over their shoulders, her feet dragging uselessly — while Ghost walked ahead, clearing the icy patches with his boots, and Kid followed with the motorcycle at a walking pace, the grocery tote bungeed to the sissy bar. It was the strangest procession Ellery Road had ever seen, and Evelyn, floating somewhere above the pain, thought that Robert would have laughed.
Marge's Diner was warm. That was the first thing — the wall of heat when the door opened, the smell of coffee and grease and pie, the bell over the door jingling. Every head turned. Five Hells Angels carrying an old woman in a too-big navy coat into a diner on a Tuesday afternoon was not a thing anyone had prepared for.
Sit her by the radiator, Doc said, and they lowered her into the corner booth, the one by the big cast-iron radiator that clanked and hissed. Marge herself came out from behind the counter, wiping her hands on her apron, her eyes going from the bikers to Evelyn and back.
What happened? Marge demanded.
Frostbite, Doc said. "She was at the bus shelter on Ellery. We need warm — not hot — water. Towels. And call an ambulance."
I don't need an ambulance, Evelyn whispered. It was the pride, automatic, rising up even now, even here. "I'm fine. I just got cold. I—"
Ma'am, Doc said, and he took her gloved hands — Tiny's gloves — and looked at her steadily. "Your fingers are white to the second knuckle. You can't feel your feet. That's not 'just cold.' That's tissue dying. You need a hospital."
She wanted to argue. She had argued with doctors before, with Nora, with everyone who had ever tried to tell her what she needed. But Doc's eyes were calm and professional and absolutely immovable, and somewhere in the haze she understood that this was not a man you argued with about medical things. This was a man who had held worse than frostbitten fingers in worse places than a diner booth.
All right, she whispered.
Preacher had picked up her grocery tote, which Kid had carried in, and he was looking at the receipt stapled to the bag — the Kroger receipt, sixty-three dollars, Denise's name at the bottom. He read it carefully, the way a man reads something that matters, and then he looked at Evelyn.
Evelyn Hawthorne, he said. "You walked to Kroger. In this."
It wasn't a question. She nodded anyway, ashamed and defiant at once.
Your car's broke down? Kid asked gently.
Battery's dead. Her voice was coming back, thin but hers. "It's been clicking. I kept meaning—" She stopped. The explaining sounded like excuses, and she was too tired for excuses.
Preacher folded the receipt and tucked it into his vest pocket. "We'll take care of the car," he said, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. "First we take care of you."
The ambulance came in eleven minutes. The paramedics — a young woman and a young man, both professional, both kind — worked around the bikers, who stood back against the wall of the booth, five big men in leather trying to take up as little space as possible. They wrapped Evelyn in blankets. They checked her vitals. They asked her name and her age and whether she had any medical conditions, and she answered, and her voice sounded like someone else's.
As they lifted the stretcher, Preacher stepped forward. "We'll follow," he said. "All of us."
You don't have to— Evelyn began.
We know, Preacher said. "We're going to anyway."
The ride to Meredith General was short and swaying, the siren used sparingly on the empty roads. Doc rode in the back of the ambulance — the paramedics let him, after one look at the way he handled himself — and he held the warm towels around her hands and talked to her the whole way, asking about Meredith, about how long she'd lived there, keeping her awake and talking, keeping her here.
The emergency room was bright and loud and warm. They cut off nothing — the coat was saved, Robert's coat, folded carefully by a nurse who seemed to understand — and they worked on her hands and feet with warm water baths and careful hands, and the pain, when the feeling came back, was like nothing Evelyn had ever known. She cried out. She couldn't help it. Doc stood at the foot of the gurney, his hand on her ankle above the basin, and he didn't look away.
Breathe through it, Evelyn, he said. "That's the nerves waking up. That's good. That's your body coming back."
It took an hour. When it was done, her fingers were red and swollen and agonizing, and two of them on the right hand — the same hand as the wrist, the Target wrist — were blistered and frightening to look at. A doctor with tired eyes told her it was mild to moderate frostbite, that she'd been lucky, that another hour might have been a different conversation. They wrapped her hands in gauze. They gave her something for the pain that made the room go soft at the edges.
And then the nurse came with the clipboard. "We need an emergency contact, Mrs. Hawthorne. Family we can call."
Evelyn looked at the clipboard. She looked at the five men standing in the waiting area beyond the curtain — Preacher, Doc, Tiny, Ghost, Kid — five Hells Angels who had stopped on Ellery Road when forty-seven cars had not. She thought about Nora, ninety miles away, who called twice a week and didn't know about the fall. She thought about Benjamin in Portland, who called once a month when he remembered. She thought about telling them — about the bus stop, the frostbite, the hospital — and she thought about their voices going thin with worry, and the conversations that would follow, and the word "assisted" and the word "living," and she felt the pride rise up in her like a wall.
No, she said. "Don't call them. Please. I'm fine now. There's no need to frighten them."
The nurse hesitated. "Mrs. Hawthorne, with frostbite this—"
I said no. Evelyn's voice was quiet, but it was steel. "I'll tell them myself. When I'm home."
The nurse wrote something on the clipboard and went away. Beyond the curtain, Preacher was watching her — she could feel it — and she knew he had heard. She braced herself for the argument, for the lecture about family and sense.