Ouellette didn’t stop at the trucking company.
“Ms. Delgado, you said the grandmother’s getting collection calls about her daughter’s medical bill?” he asked me that afternoon. “Bring me those letters.”
I brought him the whole stack from Coastal Recovery Services: two years of demand letters, along with the receipts for every fifty-dollar payment Eli had made out of his lumberyard paychecks. It came to $1,200.
Ouellette read the first letter and actually laughed, a short, angry bark.
“‘As next of kin, you may be responsible,’” he read aloud. “That’s a lie dressed up in a maybe. Under Maine law, a person’s debts are paid from their estate when they die. If the estate doesn’t have enough money, the debt generally dies with them. A mother isn’t responsible for her adult daughter’s medical bills unless she signed something agreeing to pay them, and certainly not a fifteen-year-old grandson.” He shook his head. “And collecting from a minor’s wages to pay a dead parent’s debt is the kind of thing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has strong opinions about.”
He wrote a letter to Coastal Recovery Services that same afternoon. I read the copy. It was a page and a half long, very polite, and terrifying. It demanded that they stop all contact with Bernadette Thibodeau and her grandson immediately. It informed them that the Estate of Danielle M. Thibodeau had been closed in Penobscot County Probate Court with no remaining assets. It asked them to refund the $1,200 collected from a minor in violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, within thirty days, or face a lawsuit.
They refunded it in nineteen days. The check came by FedEx with no letter, made out to Elijah Thibodeau.
Meanwhile, Joanne went to the hospital’s financial counseling office. A patient financial advocate named Linda Morrissette helped Bernadette fill out an emergency application to restore Eli’s MaineCare coverage. It turned out that when Eli moved in with his grandmother, his coverage lapsed only because a renewal form was mailed to Danielle’s old trailer in Hermon after she died. Nobody ever got it.
“He should never have lost his coverage,” Linda said. “He was a minor, an orphan, living with a low-income guardian. He qualified the whole time.” She typed fast. “MaineCare allows retroactive coverage for up to three months before the application date if you were eligible. That covers the accident. That covers all of it.”
Two weeks later, MaineCare approved Eli’s coverage retroactive to November first. Every dollar of his ICU bill, which was over $160,000 by then, was covered.
For the first time since that snowy Tuesday, Bernadette Thibodeau slept through the night.
But Eli still hadn’t woken up.
Every morning for nine days, Joanne Pelletier stopped by Eli’s room before her shift.
She still wasn’t his nurse. The ICU charge nurse, a no-nonsense woman named Theresa Boucher, made sure of that. But Theresa wasn’t made of stone. When Joanne told her the story, Theresa said, “You’ve got five minutes before shift change, every day. Family’s allowed visitors. If Mrs. Thibodeau says you’re family, you’re family.”
Bernadette said she was family.
So every morning at 6:50, Joanne came into Eli’s room carrying a small hot chocolate from the Mug & Muffin. I made it myself at 6:15 and handed it through the window when her Corolla came through. She set it on the little rolling table beside his bed, where he could have smelled it if he’d been awake.
“Morning, honey,” she’d say. “Drink this. You need something warm.”
The hot chocolate went cold every day. She poured it out and brought a fresh one the next morning.
On the eighth day, Kurt started paying for it.
“Put it on my tab,” he told me, handing me a ten-dollar bill. “Every day until he wakes up.”
On the ninth day, a Thursday in early March, Joanne walked into Room 4 with the hot chocolate, and Eli Thibodeau’s eyes were open.
She told me about it afterward, standing at my drive-thru window in the rain, crying and laughing at the same time.
“He was looking at the ceiling,” she said. “Confused, like they all are. The respiratory therapist had just taken the breathing tube out. He couldn’t really talk yet. His voice was just a scratch.” She wiped her eyes. “I didn’t know if he’d know me. I walked over to the bed with the hot chocolate, and I said, ‘Morning, honey.’”
“What did he do?”
Joanne laughed through her tears.
“He looked at me for a long time,” she said. “Then he looked at the cup in my hand. And he whispered, ‘You weren’t supposed to know.’”
I had to sit down on the stool behind the counter.
“And then,” Joanne said, “he said, ‘You were supposed to just get your coffee.’”
