He smiled faintly. "A person who cannot get out when the electricity fails is not being transported. They're being carried into danger."
June could not argue with that. Six weeks earlier, on the highway north of Bitter Lake, a passenger lift had frozen during a thunderstorm. Their driver, Marisol, had climbed under the chassis with a flashlight while two elderly passengers waited in the rain. Nobody had been hurt. June had nevertheless spent that night reading accident reports until her eyes burned.
"We can ask another dealer," she said.
"We will. But I want a proper inspection, not a promise."
She watched him remove his brown coat and hang it on the back of a chair. His shirt was clean at the collar; his work boots were not. He had come straight from the Bell Machine property outside town, where the last of the old fabrication equipment was being packed for shipment. The business had made agricultural gates, pump housings, and grain trailers for fifty years before Silas sold the manufacturing patents to a regional cooperative. The deal had been large enough that newspaper reporters used words like fortune, but Silas still repaired the office refrigerator himself.
Most people in Harper's Crossing knew that Silas Bell helped fund the transport office. Few knew the precise size of the endowment or that he had transferred its controlling vote to June two months earlier. He had done it deliberately. He could pay for vehicles; he could not be the person who decided, indefinitely, who deserved them.
June traced a route on the map from the clinic to the dialysis center. Red ink marked every place a flooded creek could cut the road. "I wish Grandma were here," she said abruptly. "She'd tell us which hill we'd have to climb to get this done."
Silas looked toward the window. Ada had driven the first volunteer route on a winter morning twenty-one years earlier, with soup in a thermos and a list of six names tucked beneath the dashboard. She had spent the next two decades persuading churches, mechanics, school districts, and doctors to help people who could no longer drive themselves. The old office was still full of her handwriting.
"She'd tell us to stop admiring the hill," Silas said. "And find a way around it."
The telephone rang. June answered, listened, and pulled the map toward her. A bridge on the northern route had been closed after an inspection. The detour added forty-seven miles.
Silas reached for a pencil. There were now four questions in his notebook.
- • •
Tessa's mother kept her medication in a biscuit tin because she said the sight of pharmacy labels made the kitchen look like a waiting room. Ruth Rowan was sixty-one, and her left hand still trembled slightly when she lifted a cup. Six months had passed since the stroke that interrupted her work as a librarian. She was learning to walk without looking down at her feet, a task her physical therapist described as progress and Ruth called irritating.
When Tessa came by that night, Ruth was sitting on the porch in a cotton cardigan, reading a mystery novel with a magnifying strip. The porch light shone over the flowers planted in old coffee cans. The property belonged to a family friend who rented it to them below market rate. Ruth liked to call that generosity a business arrangement, perhaps because a favor was harder to repay when it had no invoice.
"You look as though somebody bought a car and drove it over your shoes," Ruth said.
"Nobody bought anything. That's the problem."
Tessa put a bag of groceries on the table and went inside for the kettle. Her phone vibrated with another message from Grant. He had sent the weekend sales board, with her name highlighted in orange. Below it was a reminder that the assistant manager position would be decided by performance.
Ruth followed her to the kitchen slowly. "How long are you going to let that man hold a new job over your head like a piece of cheese?"
"Until the cheese comes with a salary," Tessa said.
"A real salary would be nice. A day off that isn't interrupted by somebody else's commission might be nicer."
Tessa opened the biscuit tin, checked the labels against the schedule taped to the fridge, and set out the evening dose. Ruth watched her without gratitude or resentment; they had negotiated the ritual until it felt like teamwork. Outside, an ambulance went by on the highway, its siren rising and falling in the distance.
"I wasn't kind to someone today," Tessa said.