Battling Entropy III: Here’s to Your Health

Flora, the landlady, fell a few days ago.

Apparently this happened while I was in the house, upstairs in my apartment, and I never heard anything.  (She lives on the first floor;  I live in the attic.)  Maybe it happened while I was in the shower, or running the hairdryer, or maybe I just failed my Perception check (an event which a long, long list of people, most of them female, enjoy depicting as occurring with some frequency.)  But in any event, the first news I had of it was when I suddenly realized that I was hearing far too many voices inside the perimeter of the yard for it to be any kind of normal activity, and came downstairs to discover myself face to face with a cop and a pair of medics, dragging items out of the stairwell in preparation for carrying her outside.  (“Jees!” said the startled cop, glancing through the doorway of my apartment and up the stairs.  “I thought that was a closet.”)  Her family, most of whom I’ve met before, and all of whom seemed to be there, gave me a strange combination of polite smiles and the jaundiced eye–  they obviously hadn’t realized I was there, any more than the cop had, and were no doubt either embarrassed that I was, or wondering why I hadn’t done anything, or both.  Flora herself was talkative.  The fall had injured her foot, and no worse:  painful certainly, and incapacitating, but nowhere near as bad as it could have been.  They carried her out, and the family followed, and in a short time I was left standing alone on the back asphalt next to the oil-soaked towels and rain-soaked air-conditioner, blinking.  There being nothing to accomplish in that location, nor anyone to engage in any kind of dialogue, I went back upstairs.

Today, I discovered from Carmine, my next-door neighbor, that while Flora is fine, she will probably not be back:  between the arthritis and the gout and now this injury, she has sufficient mobility problems there’s simply no way she can continue to live unassisted.  And while that’s a total bummer for her, it leaves me with an imminent problem.  If I’m living in the attic of Flora’s house-  without a lease or any kind of written, legal arrangement, no less-  and Flora isn’t coming back, what happens to me?…

On the other hand, things could be much worse.  It could, for instance, be Horrifying Medical Emergency Week! And it isn’t.  (At least not yet.)   Count your blessings there…