Allie and Aunt Aggie rushed into the emergency room and looked around for Celia. She wasn’t there, so Allie went to the front desk and asked about Stan.
“He’s being examined,” the uninterested receptionist told them. “Just take a seat and we’ll let you know something soon.”
Aunt Aggie wasn’t easily dismissed, so she pushed Allie aside and leaned over the desk, her eyes only inches from the receptionist’s. “Take me to him,” she ordered. “I wanna see him.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. That’s impossible.”
“Then where my niece is? Celia, his wife. You don’t take me to her, you gon’ be all over this floor.”
The receptionist got to her feet and seemed to struggle with whether or not to take this elderly spitfire seriously. Allie would have been amused if the situation weren’t so grave.
“Mrs. Shepherd is in an examining room,” the receptionist said. “I guess you can go on back.”
Aunt Aggie didn’t wait for directions. She headed through the double swinging doors with missile-like speed, and Allie followed on her heels.
Celia was having blood drawn in an examining room, but other than looking pallid, she seemed okay. “T-Celia! There you is!” Celia looked up at her aunt and eagerly accepted her desperate embrace. The T prefix—Cajun for little—was one she used only on those she loved the most.
Allie touched her chest and breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank God you’re all right.”
But she wasn’t, not really. Allie could see the terror in her red eyes as she looked up at them. “He’s dying.”
“Is that what the doctor said?” Allie asked.
“No,” Celia said. “They haven’t told me anything.”
“Then you don’t know that he’s dying. The question right now is, how are you?”
Celia rolled her eyes as if that was incidental. “I’m fine except for a little nausea that comes and goes. But Stan can’t breathe, and he’s in a coma.” Aunt Aggie’s bony hand reached out to grip hers as the nurse finished drawing her blood, and Celia turned her troubled eyes to the old woman. “Aunt Aggie, what if he dies?”
The old woman pulled her niece against her as if she were a child and stroked her pale blonde hair. “He won’t,” she said.
“God wouldn’t do that to me twice, would he?”
“If there was a God, I know he wouldn’t,” Aunt Aggie evaded.
Allie’s heart melted with compassion as she remembered that Celia had lost a husband before. “Celia, I forgot you lost your first husband. I know that makes you more afraid that you’ll have to suffer that again. But he’s in good hands.”
“Nathan was in good hands, and he died.”
Allie didn’t know how to answer that. She assumed Nathan had been her first husband, but since she didn’t know how he’d died or why, she was at a loss for words. How could she comfort Celia? She didn’t know. At this point, she could only pray.