Page 68 of Take Me Away, Cowboy

She flicked the ringer off and swiped across her phone without looking at who it might be. Only two choices were possible at this hour, and based on the breaking-up part of her day, she was pretty sure it wasn’t Owen.

“Finally,” she hissed into the receiver. “Why the hell haven’t you been returning my calls? I know for a fact you weren’t asleep because I woke up the beast trying to find you and she wasn’t pleased.”

She got up out of her seat and paced the halls, letting her mother sleep.

“Paaaaiiiigeeeee,” she heard, followed by a fit of giggles. Had she misread the caller altogether? She pulled back her phone, and sure enough, Brad’s smiling profile picture stared back at her, his number underneath it.

“Brad?”

“Well, who else would it? Would it be?” A loud belch acted as punctuation.Jesus.

“Have you been drinking?” she asked, though she was pretty sure of the answer.

“Juss a liddle.” He hiccupped twice, accentuating the idiocy of the whole night, the whole day prior.

“What the hell, Brad? Did you listen to any of my messages?” Had Paige known her brother had a secret affinity for drinking on a work night, she’d have started her calls with Cowboy Joe’s.

“Nope. Nope, nope, nope. Couldn’t figure it out. The phone and the dialing and the…” Hiccup. “…answering machine.”

Answering machine?Did he drink himself back to the nineteen eighties?

“Well, Dad’s in the hospital. He fell off the ladder and went unconscious. Where are you? Do I need to come pick you up?”

“Dad fell?” Brad giggled. “Dad fell down?” Hiccup. More giggles.

“Brad!” Paige yelled as loud as she could in the solemn quiet of the near-empty halls. “Get it together. Where. Are. You?”

“In a taxi.”

“We don’t have taxis in Banberry. Are you inHelena?!” She spat the word like a slur.

“Nope. I’m in an oooooo-ber. Uber. Ha! That’s a fun word.”

“Hand the driver the phone,” Paige demanded. How was she, the one who’d just found out she didn’t have cancer, the responsible one that night? Between her mom and her brother, she felt like she was running a daycare.

“Yep, yep, yep.” She heard his voice getting farther and farther away and then some static that sounded like the phone dropped. Paige pinched the bridge of her nose, exhaling slowly.

“This is John. How can I help you?”

“Hi, John. You have my brother, Brad in your car. He’s too hammered to understand that our dad was in an accident and that he needs you to drop him off here, at the Banberry ER. Can you do that, John?”

“I’m not supposed to take people anywhere other than where they put their destination as…” he started to say, but his voice faded and Paige heard retching in the back seat.

“Bring him here, John. You don’t want to be responsible for him getting alcohol poisoning, do you?” Thankfully, he bought the threat.

“Fine, fine. But tell him I’m charging him for getting the vomit outta my back seat.”

“Whatever you need to do, John. See you in a few minutes.”

She hung up the phone and walked outside, her back flat against the outside wall. She took a deep breath of cool air that filled her lungs, waking her up. The brick burned like ice on her shoulders, the night air around her brisk, bordering on cold. The past couple nights threatened an earlier autumn than usual.

Though she’d missed last year’s fall transition, she could recall with vivid clarity the end of summers from her childhood and the way the wind changed, the way the smells in the air shifted, the slight blend of reds discoloring the greens, signaling the aesthetically stunning start of death, of decay.

Now, though, she wished it was warmer so she could linger outside longer. She didn’t want to go back in, didn’t want to be the responsible adult, the physician-on-call with her family. More than that, she wanted time and space to think about the past twenty-four hours. She needed to sort out where she was going to go next—literally and figuratively—without the desperation of her mom or utter ineptitude of her brother. Without the strong and steady arms of Owen and the comfort they promised.

The hospital was otherwise quiet at this time of night, she gave it that. She’d done a stint at the clinic in Turks on the night on-call shift, and there, she’d found a hospital without the hustle and panic and kinetic energy of the day disquieting. It was too damn quiet, a ward of ghosts. The same eeriness enveloped her during her hospitalization post-surgery. After visiting hours, after the surgeons and oncologists had all gone home to their families, when her family had begrudgingly headed back to the farm, all that remained were the ill and the dying, herself included.

It had given her the creeps more than the idea of the mutating cells trying to commandeer her body. Now, though, she welcomed the silence, since she found herself in the no-man’s land where she was neither patient nor professional.

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