Map · Establishments · St. Clare’s Hospital
An establishment in Harmon
The cafeteria at 4:12 a.m. is the most honest room in any hospital. The surgeons sit alone. The nurses sit with one other nurse. The chaplains do not sit at all.
— The Tired Mother, chapter six
St. Clare’s Hospital sits on Cass Street, eight blocks south of downtown Harmon, on the same road as the plant but on the opposite side of the river. It is the only hospital in the county. It has eighty-four beds, twelve of them ICU, three of them in a step-down unit that was added in 2014 with money the regional health system contributed in lieu of merging the facility outright. The emergency department has six bays, plus the trauma room at the back, plus the hallway, which is where most of the December overflow lives.
It was founded in 1922 as a Catholic charity hospital. The order that founded it left in 1986. The name has not been changed. The chapel on the third floor was deconsecrated in 1991 but is still locally called the chapel.
Sarah Marsh works the night side of the St. Clare’s ER, four twelve-hour shifts a week, 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, the schedule she took for the four-dollar-an-hour differential when the bills went up in June. From the break room at 4:45 every morning she checks the family’s account. In The Good Father the ER is the steady ground against which the household’s slow collapse is measured: Sarah reads charts for a living and reads her own husband last, because a triage nurse lets a patient declare himself before she calls the team, and the patient here is the man she sleeps next to.
The St. Clare’s cafeteria is in the basement, with a wall of fluorescent-lit vending machines, a salad bar that closes at three, and twelve laminate-topped tables that have been there since the seventies. At 4:12 in the morning on the third Tuesday of October in The Tired Mother, Cat Brennan sits down at the table by the wall with a coffee and a granola bar she will not eat, and the stranger sits down across from her, and the warning happens. The Seer leaves a folded newspaper, sports section out, the high-school football score circled in brown pencil, the same pencil, the reader of book one knows, that left a Sentinel on a Lamplighter table eight years earlier.
Encounters at St. Clare’s
Cat Brennan · ER physician · the basement cafeteria, the table against the wall
“The patient you keep missing is in your own house. You will see it in October, when the school calls. By then the standing order you wrote for your husband at his deathbed is the only thing in your head still holding a beat. You stop being a surgeon for fourteen months. You come back.”
Left behinda folded Sentinel, the high-school football score circled in brown pencil.