by Cara McKenna
“It’s a shithole.”
“Oh.”
“Former factory and mill city—no shock—now it’s caught someplace between ghost town and ghetto, with a little river of civilization running through the middle, paying taxes.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Parts are, sometimes. But mainly it’s just quiet. We got substance abuse issues and the crime that goes with it, but not as bad as other places, since public services are practically nonexistent here. But you can buy a two-bedroom house for twenty grand, so here I am.”
“You’re not really selling me on it.”
“Wasn’t trying to.”
“Did you grow up around here?” I asked.
“Not really, but it’s a lot like where I did.”
“Where?”
“Hamtramck.”
I sort of knew where that was. A poor city outside Detroit, crippled like so many in the state in the wake of plant closures. “I didn’t grow up too far away. On the other side of Dearborn.”
Kelly nodded, his stern face looking different in the sky’s pink cast and the glow from the dash—somber, if not soft. “Some people grow up on the ocean, by the mountains, places where it snows or places with palm trees. That’ll always be the kind of stuff they want surrounding them. Guess I’m hardwired for cracked concrete and rust stains.”
He turned us down a more civilized block, past a hardware shop and a karate studio, an AT&T store, other signs of life. There was a heart beating inside the city’s bones, if faintly. He parked along the curb outside a bar called Lola’s and we swung open our doors, slammed them in unison. The town was half-dead but the bar had a pulse. I could hear it thumping to the rhythm of classic rock and loud conversations. Kelly held the door for me.
The patrons seemed lively enough for a Monday night, though there were plenty of places to sit. Back in manufacturing’s heyday, it would’ve surely been packed with factory workers. Kelly brushed past me and I followed him to the bar.
“Heya, Kel,” said the bartender, tossing two napkins on the wood before us. He gave me a lukewarm nod and the most cursory male assessment.
“White wine,” Kelly said, shocking me speechless. Just as well, as the bartender didn’t ask for my order yet. So my companion had a girl’s thirst to match his name.
“Sit tight.” Kelly tossed some bills on the bar and left me, presumably for the men’s room.
I studied the taps and liquor bottles but decided I’d probably get wine as well.
“Hey.”
I turned, finding a guy about my age leaning casually on the corner of the bar. He wore baggy pants and a white tank, a gold chain. He wasn’t my type at all, but his friendly, hopeful smile made me think maybe I didn’t look as wretched as I felt.
“Hey,” I said, and offered a little wave.
The bartender returned, plunking Kelly’s wine and somebody’s beer by my elbow.
“Buy you somethin’?” the friendly guy asked.
I hadn’t come here to flirt, and a polite decline was halfway to my parted lips when the guy’s face suddenly fell. I sensed Kelly at my back, tangible as a shadow cooling us.
When I craned my neck to look, I understood why the guy had withered. Kelly’s eyes had gone black, jaw set, expression like a rusty steak knife. His fingers closed over my shoulder, spreading warm misgiving down my arm, up my neck, through my chest.
“Can I help you,” he said to the guy. It was no question, just cold, hard words wrapped in barbed wire.
“No, man. Sorry.” And the guy slinked away with his tail between his legs.
Kelly let me go and took his seat. I resisted an urge to rub my shoulder and see if the skin really was as feverish as it felt. This man had a wife, and if anybody got to feel all hot and confused by his touch, it was most definitely her.
“Who was that?” I asked. And what had he done to get on Kelly Robak’s bad side? Drug dealer? Maybe some old beef over a woman?
“Never seen him before,” Kelly said.
“Oh. Then—” I stopped, frowning as Kelly slid the wine glass in front of me, the beer bottle before himself. Did I really look so rattled that I couldn’t choose my own drink? Or for that matter, handle myself around a stranger?
He held up his beer, and I went ahead and tapped my glass against it, miffed.
“Congrats on surviving day one,” he said, and took a deep pull off his bottle.
“Thanks.”
He stared at me, his pale, hueless irises tinted by the beer signs, blue and yellow and every other neon color. He had a scar above one brow, a thick shiny line that must’ve needed stitches in its day. To my great surprise, he reached out to run a fingertip up and down the frown crease between my own brows. “What’s put that there?”
I tried to snuff out the spark I’d felt from his touch, hot and startling and inappropriate. “You could’ve asked me what I wanted to drink,” I said, hoping to camouflage my unease behind annoyance.
“I’m paying.”
“That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t get to pick.”
He made a puzzled face like I was speaking Chinese, and took another sip of his beer.
I decided to drop it. Maybe it’d been some kind of ignorant chivalry, antiquated bull, like choosing your date’s order off a menu. Not that this was a date, of course. Surely Mrs. Kelly Robak would have something to say about such a notion, same as I would. Same as Kelly ought to.
I rubbed the spot he’d touched, finding my forehead greasy from the day’s long shift. I ran the heel of my hand across it, more tired than ever. My stomach gave a gurgle, anger pooling in my belly as I began to suspect maybe Kelly hadn’t brought me here to be understanding. Maybe he’d brought me here because I seemed vulnerable, amenable to a roll in the hay with a married colleague just because he’d deigned to buy me a four-dollar glass of chardonnay.
But I was also exhausted, and not thinking clearly. It was a Mom-thought, as Amber and I had years ago christened our impulsive suspicions, the little embers that could burst into blazes with the mildest provocation.
Time for a nice, neutral change of subject, before my tinder went up.
Wanting Kelly’s own answer to the question I’d posed Dennis, I asked, “Why do you wear gray, like the patients? Isn’t it confusing?”
“Sure, but the free benzo jabs are a decent trade-off.”
“Why, really?”
He shrugged. “I think it’s helpful for some residents, seeing me in their colors. It’s my job to restrain them, and I’m good at it. It’s easy for me to be the enemy, when it’s my role to physically dominate them. Just a way to say, ‘Hey, I’m on your side. Trust me.’ Because I know I don’t look like the most sympathetic guy.”
No, he didn’t. He’d been born with a cruel face, just as my little sister had been born with a deceptively wide-eyed, innocent one. Both their faces said things to men—in Kelly’s case, Don’t even fucking try me, and in Amber’s, Lead me astray. If only my sister’s choices more often contradicted the invitation.
For a while we sipped our drinks without speaking. The bar was warm, and Kelly shed his jacket. He’d swapped his gray tee for a black one, and the scars and bruises decorating his arms looked like blurry tattoos in the dim light. I could have studied them for an hour, but I forced my gaze onto the muted TV behind the bar and pretended to read the news headlines. Those arms are spoken for, I reminded myself. And you wouldn’t know what to do with them if you got the chance.
Kelly leaned over me to grab a napkin from a nearby stack, his bare forearm brushing the clothed one I had propped on the bar. The wine commandeered my lips to announce, “You don’t look like a Kelly.”
One of his brows twitched. “No? What do I look like?”
A Lance, maybe a Butch. Brutus. Killer. “I dunno. Ju
st not a Kelly.”
He sipped his drink. “It was my grandfather’s name.”
“What does your wife do?” the wine blurted.
“I’m not married.”
“Oh.” Something different in my middle squirmed, some troublemaking attraction embryo wriggling, kicking aside the anger that had been pacing there. “You still wear your ring. Has it been a long time?” Since his divorce, or maybe since she’d died, who knew? I’d let him fill that in as he wished.
He shook his head. “I’ve never been married.”
“Well, your ring is misleading. Is it to keep female patients at bay?” I teased.
He teased right back, the shadows of a smile playing about his lips as he leaned closer. “Female patients and half-drunk nurses.”
I rolled my eyes, but a hot flush crept up my neck. “Work Kelly” had clearly clocked out, and I wasn’t sure who this man was. “I’m not even a quarter drunk.”
He straightened, looking at his hand. “It was my grandfather’s ring. Same one I’m named after. My mom gave it to me when he died. That’s the finger it fit on, and I was wearing it around for a while after I got it, thinking I’d buy a chain to put it on or something. Then I wound up in a grapple with a resident and got my hand slammed against a metal door. Finger swelled up, haven’t been able to get it off since.” He presented the finger in question as if he were flipping me a lesser bird. I gave it a tug, but his thick knuckle kept it from so much as budging, corroborating his story.
“Ouch.”
“It’s either keep it on or have it cut off. And I haven’t been able to bring myself to get it clipped.”
“Understandable. Though it’s a liability. Safety-wise and romance-wise,” I said, instantly regretting it. But I’d gone there. May as well commit. “Have you had any girlfriends take issue with it?” Had or currently have . . . ? Oh God, who was this woman in my head who even cared?
“The sorts of issues I offer women tend to overshadow concerns about misleading jewelry.”
I frowned at his cryptic answer. “You mean like ordering them drinks without even asking what they like?”
He eyed my glass. “All women love white wine. White wine and salads with cut-up chicken on them.”
I scoffed. “That’s so sexist.”
“If it offends you, get your fellow females to quit ordering it all the time.” He narrowed his eyes. “What did you want to drink?”
White wine, probably. But it would’ve been nice to be consulted, what with this being the twenty-first century. “Whiskey,” I lied, wanting to sound tough.
“I stand corrected, then.”
To my dismay, Kelly flicked his hand at the bartender and ordered me a double shot of Bushmills, no ice. With this morning’s four thirty wake-up call, a twelve-hour shift, a banana for lunch, and a single bite of pizza for dinner, I’d be under the stool before I finished wincing my way through the first sip.
“Um, thanks.” I held up the shot when it arrived and Kelly tapped it with his bottle. I drank just enough for it to wet my lips and tingle against my tongue.
I set the glass down with a blasé clack, hoping I looked like I did this all the time. “What else do women find so troublesome about you?”
Kelly shrugged. “Just general bossy assholery.”
“Ah. Well, nice that you’re self-aware, I suppose.”
“I’m real my-way-or-the-highway. Got no patience when things don’t go how I want them to.”
“How so?”
He leaned his elbow on the bar and looked me square in the face. “I got exes who might try to tell you I treated them like servants. They were all fond of telling me as much, anyhow. But I work hard. I’ve got needs. If they don’t get met to my satisfaction, I get grouchy.”
“Charming.”
“Don’t get me wrong though—I’ve never shouted at a woman during an argument. Definitely never hit one. I’m a dick, not a piece of shit.”
“Gotcha.” I took a sip of my whiskey. My ludicrous attraction cooled as quickly as it had warmed, but good that he was telling me himself, I supposed.
“My sister and mom have both dated their share of your type, but none of those guys ever had the decency to own up to it.” Weird to think Kelly was one of those men who’d put my family through so much grief. Suddenly I was having a drink with the enemy . . . though it still didn’t feel that way. “You don’t seem impatient or bossy at all on the ward.”
“And I’m not. But I spend forty to fifty hours a week at everybody’s beck and call. When I’m off, I want what I want, the way I want it.”
“Understandable.” If not particularly appealing to even the most middling feminist. “Sounds very old-school. Was your dad a factory guy? Twelve-hour shift, and dinner better be waiting when he gets home?”
“The only place my dad ever spent twelve hours at was sitting on a stool, like we are now. Though if alcoholism was a paid gig, he’d have built himself an empire.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Don’t be. I don’t offend easily. Save your ‘sorries’ for somebody who’ll appreciate them.”
So he’d grown up with a drunk for a father and spent his days keeping order in a ward full of unpredictable, violent men. I guessed I could understand Kelly wanting a bit of control when he punched out. I decided to concede my annoyance over the wine.
“How did you get into nursing?” I asked. “Well, being an orderly, I mean.”
“It was real random. Or maybe not. Maybe it makes perfect sense, now that I think about it . . . By the time I was fifteen I must have been about six-two. And big. Like somebody had slipped me growth hormones at puberty. I spent so much time at this shady bar in my neighborhood, hauling my dad’s drunk ass home, they wound up giving me a job, bouncing. Years before I could even drink, myself.”
“Ah.”
“When I was in my early twenties, somebody told me about a job in prison security, so I did that for a while. Long while—nine years, I think. I got along real good with the unstable inmates. Guess I got my old man to thank for all the experience dealing with irrational, belligerent assholes. Eventually somebody hooked me up with my job at Larkhaven. Pays better than being a prison guard, and it’s less depressing. Sometimes it can feel like people are just wasting away on the ward, but not the way they do in a cell block.”
“I’ll bet.”
“What’d you do, before you came here? You said it’s your first clinical job.”
I told him about caring for my grandma. “I lived with her for about six years, and I got my LPN certification while I was doing it.”
“What’d you do before that?”
“Worked a bunch of retail jobs, saving up for when I figured out what I wanted to study,” I said with a shrug. “I’m only twenty-seven.” Twenty-eight tomorrow, actually, but I decided to round down.
He blinked, clearly surprised.
I laughed. “Oh, great. How old do I look?” How many miles had the day’s stress put on my formerly munchkin-like face?
“I hadn’t really thought about it.”
“Well, after today I feel about fifty, so no offense taken. How old are you?”
“Thirty-eight.”
I nodded. Ten years’ age difference wouldn’t bother me, had I been interested in Kelly. Which I didn’t want to be. I’d been heaped with at least a decade’s more adult responsibility than most of my peers. I had more to talk about with a guy Kelly’s age than some twentysomething dude. The years most people dedicate to getting wasted, I’d spent changing my once so strong and sharp and independent grandma’s diapers, soothing her night terrors. Trying to simultaneously support my mother and distance myself from her self-manifested drama. Then my sister and her chaos, her pregnancy . . . Just thinking about it, the whiskey in my hand took on a new appeal
.
“You’ll do okay,” Kelly said after a long lapse. “Give it a week or two. You’ll scab over quicker than you think.”
“Ew. I’m not sure I want to, when you word it like that.” And the thought scared me, the idea that I’d get numb to the ward. I’d end up all hard and detached like Jenny and the other older staffers, not jaded, but . . . yeah, all scabbed over. Skin like tree bark. I sipped the liquor, suddenly appreciating how soft I usually felt.
“I’m not sure I want to stop feeling stuff,” I told Kelly.
“You still feel stuff. You just get good at choosing which provocations are worth getting upset over. And in the end, hardly any are. Your BS filters will be industrial grade. Month from now I guarantee if you get cut off in traffic, you won’t give half a shit.”
I pictured the guy he’d just run off, some stranger whose only crime had been trying to order Kelly’s coworker a drink. This philosophy clearly had some macho nuances I wasn’t grasping.
“Why won’t I care?” I asked. “Because I’ll know it’d be so much worse, getting my ear bitten off by somebody in the midst of a psychotic break?”
Kelly laughed and his smile caught me off guard. It changed his face, like clouds had broken and a big beam of Jesus-light had shot down from heaven to paint the world gold. Heat pooled between my legs, some latent bad-decision gland kicking in, one I’d always assumed I hadn’t inherited from my mother. Shit.
“Just trust me,” he said. “I know nothing I say tonight’ll make you feel anything but more freaked out, but you’ll be fine. You’ll find a balance.”
“Maybe I’ll find out I’m not cut out for this.”
“Maybe. But if you had the balls to see your grandma at her worst, probably take her to the toilet and bathe her and watch the woman you knew go away, years before she actually died . . .”
Get out of my head, Kelly Robak.
“You could be good at this,” he said. “And it takes about three good nurses to balance out the damage a single shitty one can do, so I’m hoping you’ll stick it out.”
His flattery warmed me like a blanket, draping me in the strangest sense of comfort. This gigantic, hardened man thought I had what it took to do his job.