I turned to the rest of the family, and I did not have to say anything, because they had heard the recording and read my father’s face and done their own arithmetic.

Aunt Lois was crying, and shaking her head, not at me.

My uncle Delbert would not look at Brady at all.

One by one, without a word of goodbye to the two of them, the family turned and walked out down the corridor together, and no one offered a ride or a loan or a hand.

Brady and Marcia were left standing alone in the middle of the ER hallway — my mother still in the gown she’d worn to play a corpse, about to be discharged with a real bill for a room she’d never needed and a police file with her name in it; my brother staring at a phone that held only the numbers of people he could no longer pay.

Their alliance of convenience had lasted exactly as long as the money had.