Christy and the Killer Cleats surged past Julie and made another goal, the whole team erupting in cheers.
At least they didn’t trample Julie, which I took as an act of rare mercy on their part. I stood up and waited for Julie to get to her feet.
Monk tugged at my shirt.
“You’re standing,” he said.
“I know that, Mr. Monk.”
“But everyone else is sitting,” Monk said. “You’re making a scene.”
“I’m concerned about my daughter.”
“What if another person stands up? Then it’s two people standing and everyone else sitting, and before you know it, the whole world collapses into anarchy.”
At that moment, my whole world was one twelve-year-old girl and she wasn’t standing up. I ran out onto the field. Raul joined me.
Monk stood and waved everyone else in the bleachers to follow, which they did, presumably cowed into obedience by Captain Stottlemeyer’s speech.
When Raul and I reached Julie, she was sitting up, cradling her right arm and trying very hard not to cry.
“Are you okay, honey?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I think my arm is broken.”
“It’s probably just a sprain,” Raul said.
He was accustomed to kids overreacting to the sudden pain of an unexpected fall. But he didn’t know Julie the way I did. When she was a baby, she once managed to wriggle out of her high chair and fell on the kitchen floor. Any other baby would have been wailing, but Julie sat there, fighting the urge to cry and furious with herself for not being able to succeed.
Julie was a fighter, like her dad.
So seeing her now, eyes filled with tears, told me more than any X-ray ever could. If she said her arm was broken, it was.
I looked up and saw Monk organizing the reluctant parents into a circle around us. According to Monk-think, if one spectator was on the field, then all the spectators had to be out there. Monk had a pained expression on his face, even more so than Julie. He leaned down and whispered in my ear.
“Get ahold of yourself, woman,” Monk said. “This is no way to behave in public.”
“We’re going to the hospital, Mr. Monk,” I said.
“Why would you want to do a crazy thing like that?” he said, exasperated, as Raul and I gently lifted Julie to her feet.
“Can’t you see that Julie has hurt herself?” I said as we led Julie toward the parking lot. Even though I was pretty sure she’d broken her arm, I didn’t want to confirm her fears by saying it aloud.
“You can’t take her to a hospital,” he said, trailing after us, insistently waving the other parents to follow. “They’re full of sick people!”
“That’s where we’re going,” I said. “If you want to take a taxi home, be my guest.”
He groaned. “That’s like giving me a choice between slitting my own throat and shooting myself.”
But he came with us anyway.
The doctor had already given Julie a preliminary exam and she’d just returned from having her arm x-rayed when Monk finally joined us. He opened the curtain surrounding Julie’s bed in the ER as if he was stepping out onto a stage.
Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Adrian Monk!
He’d managed to find a hospital patient gown to put over his clothes, rubber gloves for his hands and a surgical mask to cover his nose and mouth.
It was quite a sight and well worth the wait. He brought a smile to Julie’s face when she needed it the most—not that he meant to.
“What?” Monk asked us, totally oblivious to his clownish appearance.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Mr. Monk,” Julie said, “but you look silly.”
“I think what you mean is ‘sensibly dressed.’ ”
“You’re right,” she said, sharing a glance with me. “That’s exactly what I meant.”
“I’m relieved to hear you say that,” he said as he wheeled in a cart containing gowns, gloves and masks for us both. “It may not be too late to save you, too.”
“From what?” I said.
“You name it,” he said. “The black death, Ebola, scurvy.”
“You can’t catch scurvy,” Julie said. “You get it from not eating enough oranges.”
“That’s an old wives’ tale,” Monk said, handing out our garments, “from wives who later died of scurvy.”
That’s when the doctor came in. He had such a grim expression on his youthful face, I was afraid he was going to tell us Julie had a brain tumor.
“I’m afraid you have a broken wrist,” the doctor said. “The good news is that it’s a clean break. You’ll only have to wear a cast for a couple weeks.”
If that was all, why did he have to look so serious? Maybe he thought it made him appear more learned and mature so he wouldn’t get a lot of flack from patients for being so young.
Actually, it made him look like he’d eaten something for lunch that decided to fight back.
“Do I get to pick the color for my cast?” Julie asked.
“Absolutely,” he said and waved over an ER nurse.
She walked behind Monk and held up a chart with a dozen sample plaster colors for Julie to see. There was something vaguely familiar about the nurse, but I couldn’t place her.
She had thick, curly brown hair with blond highlights and stood with attitude. By that, I mean she had a certain rough confidence about her, the kind that’s like a scar. It’s a toughness you can only get on the streets, and not the ones you find in suburban housing tracts. Growing up in suburbia, you end up with a pampered confidence that comes from knowing you have mutual funds earning money for you.
“We have a wide selection of colors to choose from,” the doctor said. “Or you can go with
