Here’s what a community clinic on the east side actually is. Sixty percent Medicaid. Fifteen percent uninsured.

A quarter of my patients are children whose parents work jobs that provide health coverage the way a screen door provides shelter.

We bill what we can, we write off what we can’t, and the difference between those two numbers is what I’ve been covering out of my own salary for two years, which Denise knows about and has stopped commenting on.

Laura says I have built myself the most expensive possible way to keep having the same argument with a man who left in 2007.

Laura is usually right.

“There’s a woman out front,” Denise said, closing the laptop. “She’s been in the waiting room since ten past ten.”