Rescue Read Free Page A

with a book, but the man knew everything there was to know about hardware and what to do
     with it. On the place mats at Keezer’s Diner was an ad for his father’s store: Webster’s Hardware, depicted with a likeness
     of Webster’s grandfather, a banner, and the tagline “Quotes Cheerfully Given.”
    Webster’s mother taught fifth grade at Hartstone Elementary and, at sixty-one, was thinking of retiring soon. Webster had
     been a late baby, his parents unable to conceive until his mother was thirty-nine. Once a blond, but now gray, she had wide
     hazel eyes and a widow’s peak she’d bequeathed to her son. Every night, she’d take an armful of papers out of her briefcase
     and sit down to grade them. She was the peacemaker in the family but could be stern when the occasion called for it. Webster
     had sometimes wondered what she was like with the more unruly students in her classes.
    “Can I make you some eggs?” she asked as she stood by the counter.
    “No, toast is OK,” Webster said. “I have to get back to Rescue.”
    He didn’t. He intended to return to the hospital.
    “You were just there, weren’t you?” she asked. “I heard you come in.”
    “Just some follow-up,” Webster said. “I’ll be back home soon.”
    “Well, I think you’d better,” she said. “You need to get your sleep.”
    Webster was a part-time EMT, hoping to work his way into a full-time position, one that would require that he be at Rescue
     while in service. For now he got the calls at home, and his parents were used to the tones and to watching their son stand
     up from the dinner table without a word and take the stairs three at a time, or to hearing a car door close in the middle
     of the night.
    Just before Webster’s senior year in high school, when his father suffered his own mini-recession at the hardware store, Webster
     began to look at junior colleges he could commute to, convinced that by the time he graduated there would be money for the
     University of Vermont in Burlington. But when Webster graduated with a certificate in business—about as useful as an old Christmas
     card, he’d decided—he chose not to take over his father’s hardware store, which had always been the family plan.
    The idea of it filled him with dread. He wasn’t for the open road like a lot of guys he knew, but he wanted to do something
     more exciting in life than stand behind a register six days a week. He remembered the evening he told his parents at the kitchen
     table, his father stoic and nodding, his mother stunned. Theyassumed he had something better in mind. He didn’t, but he’d seen an ad that had triggered his curiosity.
    “An EMT,” he said.
    “An EMT?” his father asked, incredulous. “You’re kidding.”
    “How long have you wanted to do this?” His mother’s voice was higher pitched than normal.
    Webster lied. “A year or so.”
    “It doesn’t pay very well,” his father, ever the pragmatist, said.
    “Eventually the pay’s OK.”
    “You’ll see horrible things, Peter.” This from his mother, her eyes distant.
    “Where do you train?” his father asked.
    “I’m looking into that right now,” Webster said, and with that his future seemed destined.
    He took an EMT course at Rutland Hospital, went on observation tours, and passed the exams. His interest in emergency medicine
     grew steadily the more he learned about it, and it seemed to him that he had accidentally made the right choice for himself.
     He was twenty-one when he got certified.
    For his graduation present, his parents gave him a sum of money that he used to buy a secondhand police cruiser, all the markings
     gone but still as fast as the day it had rolled out of the factory. Speed was everything for a medic, though in winter, when
     he had to put the studded tires on, he lost some of that.
    Webster studied the woodwork around the window over the sink and guessed there probably wasn’t a right angle in the entire
     house. He doubted