Page 10 of Hold the Pickle
“You work at South General?” Evan asks.
Dalton nods as we step outside, and Evan locks the door behind us. “Just started my internship.”
“It’s nice to have a doctor around.”
Dalton looks very pleased with himself as we head back to the office.
“How long have you two been together?” Evan asks.
I’m about to correct this entire line of thinking when Dalton says, “It feels brand new.”
Evan laughs as we pass by the gorgeous courtyard to enter the office to sign the paperwork.
And just like that, I have an apartment. A roommate.
And, if you ask Evan, a boyfriend.
What have I done?
4
DALTON
I’m toast after a twenty-hour ER shift that involved more bodily fluids than the morning after a frat party, and about as much regret on the part of our patients. It was messy, unglamorous work, the stuff an intern’s bad days are made of.
But today I have a bed waiting for me, a real one. I don’t have to sleep on Jerry’s floor or end up the jungle gym for his pair of hyperactive chihuahuas.
Nadia shouldn’t be at the new place. I haven’t talked to her since we got the keys. But it’s a little past nine a.m., smack in the middle of her deli shift, and I have hours ahead of blissful solitary sleep.
I can almost feel the pure bliss of smooth sheets on my cheek.
Sunlight angles into the space as I open the door. It’s spotlessly clean, which is good. The stranger I’m living with isn’t so much of a slob that she wrecked it in a day.
I look for signs of her, a few clues to who she might be other than the goddess in a pencil skirt I’ve known for maybe two hours.
There are blackout curtains on the window and a blue comforter on the bed. Nice. Living with a woman has its perks.
I drop a trash bag and my oversized army duffle onto the floor. For a moment, I run my hand over the name MURPHY stenciled in black on its dark green surface. It belonged to Dad. I lost him a long time ago to complications from a wound he got in Afghanistan.
I already know enough from med school that I could have helped. But I was only fourteen then. And nobody could make him go to doctors. He was stubborn that way.
He might not even approve of my med school, had he known. I like to think he’d be proud, though. No sense assuming any different.
I open the closet. It’s empty. I realize there’s not enough space for one of us, much less both, so I leave it to Nadia. Maybe she wants to discuss it before we fill it. It doesn’t matter. I don’t have much and no time to accumulate more.
There’s a dresser up against the wall. I pull the drawers open. Also empty. I take only the bottom one. She can have the other two.
I don’t need much in the drawer, just extra scrubs, socks, and underwear. I don’t have a life outside of work at the moment. I remove my toiletry bag and leave my workout clothes and a few nicer outfits in the duffle.
I head to the kitchen. The cabinets are mostly empty and the refrigerator bears only a stack of peach yogurt and a bag of apples. We will fill it in time.
Maybe I can spot a garage sale this weekend and nab some dishes. Mom loves a good yard sale. She copies the pickers on the TV shows and always offers a price for multiple things, so it seems like a lot of money even if she’s getting half of it for free.
She’s smart. Her ship simply never came in. I hope I can change that. I’m determined to. Now that I’m paying half of what I expected, I can send her more.
We were homeless more than once growing up, Dad going to one shelter, and Mom and I to another. If Dad was too bad off to leave, we would sleep in the backs of post offices that had all-night access to the mailboxes, mainly so we could all be together to make sure he was okay.
That won’t happen again to Mom. Not on my watch.
