The cursor blinked three times before she pressed enter. The chat box filled with a numbered list - clean, sans-serif, confident - and she held her reading glasses against her sternum the way she used to hold her phone when she was waiting for news. She printed the page on Roy's old printer, the one that still had his name on a piece of masking tape along the side, and set it next to the legal pad. The font was larger than she'd expected.
She typed *but what if he already signed* and the answer came back before she'd set the pen down - longer this time, with a subheading. She underlined *generally speaking* twice, then drew a small star next to *this varies by state*, the way she used to mark the good coupons. The legal pad was college-ruled and she filled four lines, then six - the blue ink going a little thin where the pen was running out. By the third question she had stopped reading the whole answer and was just looking for the sentence that would let her breathe.
She called the number on the referral slip and told the woman she'd need to push it back, and the woman said the next available after that would be March, and she said March was fine. She folded the referral slip in half and then in half again until it was the size of a book of matches, and set it on top of the printer, next to the roll of masking tape Roy had used for everything. Then she went back to the chat box and typed *thank you* the way she would to a person - and waited a moment after it replied before she closed the tab.
The nurse had paper-clipped a yellow sticky note to the corner of the form, and the sticky note said *pt. has questions* in ballpoint, and Delia looked at that instead of the number for a long time. She pulled the legal pad from her bag and it fell open to the page with the star next to *this varies by state*, the blue ink thin at the end of each line where the pen had been dying. The form had a box labeled *estimated cost of care* and the number inside it had two commas, which she counted with her fingernail - pressing small crescents into the paper.
The daughter turned the legal pad sideways to read the margin note, a small arrow Delia had drawn pointing to nothing, just an arrow. She got to *generally speaking* and stopped, her thumb pressing the spiral binding until the metal left a faint ladder in her skin. The orange chair had a crack along the seat that someone had covered with a strip of silver duct tape, and she set the pad there - on the tape, face down. She put her hand on top of it and looked at the intake window, where a woman in scrubs was eating a yogurt with a plastic spoon and not looking back.
The laptop screen had gone the gray of old dishwater, and when she walked past it she didn't touch the trackpad. The appointment card was under the sugar bowl, which still had the small ceramic bird on the lid that Roy had bought at a gas station in Gatlinburg - and she'd wedged the card so only the specialist's name showed, the rest of it face-down against the wood. A coffee ring had dried into a pale oval on the table beside the laptop, and she'd set her mug inside it again this morning without thinking, the way you step into your own footprint in snow.
She found the printed page folded inside the phone book she kept under the microwave, and she didn't remember putting it there. The subheadings had ghosted through to the back - mirror-writing she couldn't read, and the corner where she'd underlined *generally speaking* had torn a little along the crease. Her sister asked what the specialist said and she smoothed the page flat against the counter with the heel of her hand, pressing out the fold, and said he'd explained everything very clearly.
The specialist had written something on a prescription pad and torn it off and handed it to her, and it wasn't a prescription - just a word and a phone number, and the word was *navigator*. She'd looked it up that night with the laptop still warm from the afternoon, and the chat box had opened the same as always, the cursor patient and ready, and she had typed the word in and read the whole answer and then read it again - and it told her what a navigator was in the way that a dictionary tells you what *home* means. She folded the paper from the prescription pad and put it in the drawer with the twist ties and the birthday candles burned down to nothing, next to the coupon for the grocery store that had closed in 2019. She didn't type another question.
The navigator's name was printed on a paper tent card with a laminator bubble in one corner, and she'd taped a photograph of a dog to the edge of her monitor with a strip of the same masking tape Roy used, the same tan color, the same brand. She slid the printed page across the desk without being asked - the one with *generally speaking* and the torn corner, and the navigator smoothed it flat with two fingers the way you'd handle something that had been in someone's pocket for a long time. Then she turned it over and wrote four names on the back in a handwriting that pressed hard enough to leave grooves, and circled one of them twice, and said *this one picks up*.
