Excerpt from Small Rain by Garth Greenwell, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

For eight hours the pain lasted and then, not all at once but slowly, gradually, I couldn't have said when it happened, it began to ease; the fist relaxed its grip, I could breathe again and think. The pain didn't go away, I told the doctors, but it felt manageable, I could bear it, I could stand up and talk with L, who had been beside himself with worry, he said; he had looked in on me many times over the hours but I hadn't noticed, once he had called my name but I hadn't heard. It was something I ate, I told him, food poisoning, and when he said again I should go to the hospital I said it was passing already, it was nothing, it would go away on its own. And the fever, one of the doctors said, when did that start, and I said The same day as the pain, I don't know what time it started but that evening I had chills and aches in all my limbs, so of course I thought it was Covid, a Google search found that sometimes people did have stomach pains, it was a rare symptom but not unheard of. Basically nothing is unheard of, the nurse said to me days after the pain started, when finally I did want to go to urgent care and they insisted I get a Covid test first, six months into the pandemic and we still know so little about this disease. The fever was highest on the first day, I said to the doctor, about 102, then it fell off, on the other days it hovered around 100. The pain never went away, I went on, but for the next two days it was bearable, it felt like a normal stomachache almost, indigestion and bloating, and the pain in my groin faded too, I could walk and talk, I didn't have much appetite but I could read and work a little. And then yesterday it got worse again, the pain in my stomach but especially a new pain in my lower back, I thought maybe I had wrenched it on the first day when I was in so much pain. It got so bad that I couldn't sleep, even fitfully, I couldn't sleep at all, so finally I called urgent care. L had made me call, was the truth of it, he got so upset finally I couldn't bear it, and the morning after the Covid test came back negative (the hospital had set up a drive-through clinic, I rolled down my window and they stuck the long swab up my nose) I drove—You drove, the doctor said, and I said What else was I going to do, of course I drove—to urgent care. L wanted to come but it wasn't permitted, there were new policies in the pandemic and patients had to come alone. He was in the kitchen when I left, still in his pajamas—he wore real pajamas, not just a T-shirt and sweats but actual clothes for sleeping: he likes a sense of ceremony about things, for each moment to be considered; a day should be a work of art, he likes to say. The ones he wore now had a pattern of little deer; he ordered them after we moved into our new neighborhood, where there were many deer, we both gasped in wonder to see them in our yard on winter mornings, it seemed magical to us and especially to L, who had never seen them before coming to America. I laughed the first time I saw the pajamas, he came to bed in them and we both laughed, his pijama de ciervos. He hugged me before I left. It's good you're going, he said, you'll find out what it is and they'll make it better, and he stood at the door as I pulled out of the drive, watching me leave.

It was very early, I was the first person at the clinic when it opened. The woman at registration asked me to wait at the door while she pulled on her face shield, not the flimsy almost disposable kind I had seen around town but made of a thick hard plastic, black, almost military. It was open in the back but otherwise it resembled the helmets police were wearing at the demonstrations that filled the news, protests that were largely about the militarization and brutality of the police, brutality that began, I sometimes thought, with the helmets and armor that sealed them off from the people they faced. The nurse who saw me was tired and kind, patient as I told for the first time the story I would soon tire of telling. She took a urine sample and did an exam, palpating my stomach, listening to my lungs. She called in another nurse and asked to examine my testicles, then told me to lean against the bed while she inserted a finger in my ass, the first humiliation, I thought, a visit to the doctor is always humiliating, but she was quick about it, efficient. The second nurse ducked out as I pulled up my pants and the first nurse gestured for me to sit, not on the examination table but in the chair near the computer, so that I was a person again, not just a patient. There were things she could rule out, she said, based on the urine sample and the exam, there wasn't a bladder infection or a hernia, or any of a long list of maladies she recited, I don't remember everything she said. We could do blood work that might rule out other things, but really you need imaging and that we can't do here. The obvious worry is appendicitis, and even if the blood work ruled that out I'd want a CT to see if something else showed up. So I want you to go to the ER, she said, I'm sorry, I know it isn't what you hoped to hear but I think it's the best course. There were two options in town, the huge university hospital and a much smaller, private facility, where the wait would probably be shorter. It was up to me where I went but since the urgent care was run by the university her notes would automatically be transferred to them, they could see the tests she had run and the things she had ruled out, they wouldn't have to call to be briefed. She looked at the computer. And you have university insurance, she said, are you faculty, and I said I wasn't, my partner was, I had insurance through him. It was expensive, they took hundreds from L's paycheck each month; we were lucky they had domestic partner insurance at all but it cost twice what it would have if we were married. We complained about it every month but we didn't want to be married, we both hated marriage. I had thought about dropping it and finding something cheaper, or even going without for a while, I was healthy and still thought of myself as young, young-ish; I thought of myself as lucky is what I mean, I guess, though really I didn't think of my health much at all, which was the luck, the privilege of health. Okay, I said to the nurse, I'll go to the university, and she nodded and stood, moving on already to the next patient, of which there were many now, when I stepped into the sitting area there were a dozen people waiting.

Excerpted from Small Rain by Garth Greenwell. Copyright © 2024 by Garth Greenwell. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.