16
Insurance Fees Lucas Thornton
My mother finally paid off my nose. It took four years, several thousand
dollars, and a whole lot of frayed nerves, but we finally did it, the three of us. To celebrate, my parents took me to my favorite Thai restaurant. I refrained from getting Thai iced coffee, opting instead for a complimentary glass of water. I also ordered veggie pad Thai instead of my personal favorite, shrimp pad Thai, because shrimp cost a whole four dollars extra. At the end of the dinner, my dad tipped the waitress a five-dollar bill, approximately fifteen percent of our thirty-seven-dollar meal. My mother wanted to give her a dollar or two more. We went there often enough and we considered this waitress sweet, but my father dissuaded my mother by proudly showing her the dark confines of his empty billfold.
On the way home, I sit in the backseat of our minivan with my head idle
against the headrest. As I watch the few bright lights of my hometown whip past my eyes, my mother, a silhouette, suddenly says, “I can’t believe those doctors.”
Which doctors? There were so many, but my dad beats me to the
question.
“Who are you talking about, hon?”
I see my mother’s outline shift toward me. The digital red light of the
radio reveals her moving lips.
“The county doctors, the ones at the ER. The ones who said we couldn’t
get any indigent pay because we didn’t live in the damn county.”
“They weren’t any better than the principal. We were just a liability to
him. He didn’t want a claim on his hands,” my dad says.
And here they are, going at it again. They have been complaining like
this for four long years. Of course, they have every right to complain, and it’s certainly cathartic in some instances, but it wears thin, especially for third party spectators who are not as adept in the art of the complaint. I feel far removed from the conversation in the backseat, shrouded in incomplete darkness, struggling to remember all these people who apparently swindled me while I was
