Our insurance has a seven-thousand-dollar out-of-pocket limit.
That’s the family maximum. Through the feedlot’s group plan. After you hit seven thousand dollars in deductibles and copays, they pay a hundred percent for the rest of the year.
We hit it in four days.
Four days. The helicopter alone was thirty-one thousand dollars. Our share of it was the deductible, and the deductible was half our out-of-pocket. Then the ER in Emporia. Then the burn unit. Then the surgery.
By the end of the fourth day in Wichita, we owed seven thousand dollars. To the hospital. On payment plans that would take us four years.
And the insurance didn’t cover everything after that, either. Not really.
Bryce’s compression garments. Custom-made sleeves and a vest, fitted to his body, that he has to wear twenty-three hours a day for a year so the scars don’t thicken. They have to be replaced every three months because he’s growing. Four hundred and twenty dollars a set. Insurance covered two sets a year. He needs four.
The silicone gel sheets for his scars. Not covered.
Gas to Emporia for physical therapy, twice a week. Sixty miles round trip.
Gas to Wichita for follow-ups with Dr. Okafor. Two hundred and forty miles round trip.
Josh’s lost hours at the feedlot. The two days they gave him off were unpaid.
My two weeks of leave from the school. Unpaid.
I added it up at the kitchen table on a legal pad. I’m a school cook. I’m good at numbers. I order food for two hundred and forty kids on a federal budget of three dollars and seventy-six cents per child per day. I know how to stretch a dollar.
Over the next year, beyond our insurance, Bryce’s care was going to cost us about six thousand, four hundred dollars.
Three thousand, one hundred would have been half.
Josh didn’t speak to his brother for a week.
He didn’t speak to anybody much. He went to work. He came home. He sat with Bryce on the couch and watched cartoons. He took Biscuit for walks down the county road at night, alone.
When Rodney called, Josh let it go to voicemail. Rodney called four times. Josh deleted all four messages without listening to them.
Then, on the eighth night, Josh came in from walking the dog and sat down across from me at the kitchen table.
I was paying bills. The hospital. The pharmacy. The compression garment company in Kansas City.
He watched me for a while.
“He’s not a thief, Cass,” he said.
I didn’t look up.
“I know he’s not,” I said.
“He’s scared of that truck,” Josh said.
I set down my pen.
“Scared of it?”
Josh looked at the window. At the dark pasture behind our house. At the black, burned strip of grass along the back fence where the fire came through. It was starting to green up now. New grass coming up through the ash.
“You know about Dad,” he said.
“I know he died in a grass fire,” I said. “In 2011. Before we got married.”
“Rodney was on the truck,” Josh said.
He told me the rest that night. At our kitchen table. I’d been married to him for eleven years and I’d never heard it.
April 2011. The big fire in the Hensley pasture. The same pasture. A wildfire that got away from somebody’s burn pile and took out four thousand acres before they stopped it.
Josh’s father, Harlan Weller, was fire chief then. He was sixty-one. He’d been on the department for thirty-five years.
Rodney was thirty, running the pump on the old brush truck. The same truck. That 1998 Ford.
Harlan was out ahead of the truck with a hose line, on foot, fighting the fire head. The wind shifted. The fire turned. Harlan called for more water.
And the pump quit.
“Lost pressure,” Josh said. “Just died. Rodney said it made this sound, like a cough, and the hose went limp in Dad’s hands. And the fire came over him.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
“Rodney spent thirty seconds trying to get it restarted,” Josh said. “Thirty seconds. Then he jumped off the truck and ran out to Dad. He pulled him out with his bare hands.” Josh’s voice cracked. “Dad died two days later. In the same burn unit in Wichita. Sixth floor.”
He looked down at the table.
“The pump got rebuilt after that,” he said. “Patched up. It’s been running on patches for thirteen years. And every year, Rodney’s begged the county commission for money for a new one. Every year, they say no.”
“And then Dale and Mike went out in it,” Josh said quietly. “To get Bryce. With that same pump. And it held. This time it held.”
He looked at me.
“Rodney’s been in that station every night since,” Josh said. “Since March. Sitting in the bay with that truck. Doug Kemper saw his light on at two in the morning.”
I sat at my kitchen table with the bills spread out in front of me and didn’t say anything for a long time.
“Josh,” I said finally. “I’m not going to call the newspaper. I’m not going to post anything on Facebook. I’m not going to say a word about your brother to anybody.”
“Okay.”
“But I’m not going to sit here either,” I said.
Chapter Five: The Locker
I didn’t call anybody.
I didn’t post anything.
I’m a school cook.
I make chili for two hundred and forty kids every other Thursday. It’s on the menu. It’s the most popular lunch we serve. The kids line up for it. The teachers line up for it. Mrs. Abernathy comes down from her office for it.
My chili recipe is my grandmother’s. Ground beef and onions and kidney beans and tomatoes, and a spice blend she never wrote down that I learned by standing on a step stool in her kitchen when I was six. I make it in a forty-gallon steam kettle. I know exactly how much meat feeds how many people.
On a Monday morning in April, I called the locker.
Elk Bend Meat Locker, on Main Street. Owned by the Kraus family since 1946. It’s where every rancher in the county gets their beef processed.
Hank Kraus answered.
“Hank,” I said. “It’s Cass Weller. I need sixty pounds of hamburger.”
There was a pause.
“Sixty pounds?” he said.
“Sixty.”
“That’s a lot of chili, Cass.”
“I’m feeding a lot of people,” I said.
Another pause. A longer one.
“I heard about the money,” Hank said quietly. “From the first supper.”
“I’m not talking about that, Hank,” I said. “I’m just ordering hamburger.”
He didn’t say anything for a long time.
“I’ll have it ready Friday,” he said finally. “No charge.”
“Hank, no…”
“Cass,” he said. “Bryce sat in my shop every Saturday last summer while you did the grocery shopping. Helped me wrap steaks. Kid wrapped a better steak than my own son.” He cleared his throat. “Sixty pounds. No charge. Don’t argue with me.”
Then I asked Earl.
Earl Haskins is the fire chief. He took over after Harlan Weller died in 2011. He’s sixty-eight now, a retired rancher, with a white mustache and a navy blue department jacket he wears everywhere, even to church.
I found him at the station on Tuesday evening. He was in the bay, working on the brush truck. The old 1998 Ford, red and dented, with ELK BEND VFD in gold letters on the side. He had the pump housing open and was looking at it with a flashlight.
He heard me come in. He straightened up. He wiped his hands on a red rag.
“Cass,” he said.
“Earl.”
