Miss: You can't swing it, and you're discharged

Dr. Breedlove and Mary can't figure out another time to get all three of you together, but in the meantime you're receiving the best of care. After several days when they're convinced your bones are starting to knit, they rig you up with a walking cast, a funny thing that will let you hobble around, and arrange for your discharge. There's some hope of sending a visiting nurse around to give you and Mary a walk-through of the care material, but for now, you're being sent home with a big manila envelope of instructions and some bottles of pills.

Mary is busy on shift at the diner at your discharge time, so the hospital arranges to drop you off home. You doze in the medical transport shuttle as it winds its way along the country roads home.

You thank the driver for helping you out of the car. He leaves you and your little bag of personal possessions and gets going down the road.

It's not until you see the hospital shuttle vanish round the curve in the country road that you realize you've been dropped in the wrong place. You're standing at a mailbox, holding a little bag of your stuff, unsteady on your new walking cast, somewhere on a country road not too far from home.

But not home.