Instead, I was standing in Mr. Tennon’s bathroom with my head under the sink faucet, taking deep breaths and trying to calm my anger.
My hair was still wet and I was patting my face with some scratchy paper towels when I finally stepped out into the hallway to check on my next resident. But, the moment I shut his door behind me, I wished I’d just stayed under the urine stream.
Because he was right there. The man that I would pine after for the next two years:
Sawyer.
“Oh, sorry,” he said, gripping either side of my shoulders to steady me. I’d almost walked directly into him when I’d exited Mr. Tennon’s room.
His hands dropped back to his sides as I turned to take him in. He was tall, taller than me by a couple inches, so I had to tilt my head back to look up into his emerald green eyes. Those eyes were connected to a face that was friendly, open, and handsome. It wasn’t perfect in the traditional movie star sense, but it made me pause all the same. His brown hair was a little too long on top, and his thin layer of facial hair made him look older than he was.
“I… have to get urine out of my hair,” I stammered like a simpleton before staring at him for two more seconds and then turning to bound down the hallway.
After that first day, I chopped my long hair off into a pixie cut and wore a shower cap whenever I was undressing Mr. Tennon.
The second time I saw Sawyer, I was sitting in Anne’s room during my lunch break. We were sharing a chicken salad sandwich and watching daytime television when there was a knock at the door. Anne told the person to come in, and as the door opened and Sawyer walked in, my mind froze.
I hadn’t known he was at Paradise Springs for Anne the first time I bumped into him, so to suddenly glance up and see him standing in her doorway really threw me for a loop.
“Oh, Sawyer! I wasn’t expecting you so soon!” Anne pushed up off her bed and went to greet him as I sat in complete shock. Their hug gave me a quick second to take him in without them noticing, and boy, did I take him in. He was wearing black converse, jeans, and a soft-looking t-shirt that fit him well. He looked to be a little older than me, but it was hard to tell.
“Yeah, I was able to cut out from work early,” he said, dipping to kiss her cheek. It wasn’t until he pulled away that his gaze finally settled on me.
The normal reaction would have been to keep eye contact and smile or wave. Instead, I dropped my gaze to Anne’s quilt and ignored his presence all together.
Did he remember me as urine girl?
“You got a haircut,” he said, drawing my attention back up to him. He was smiling as he crossed his arms, not in a rude way, but in a relaxed, easy-going sort of way.
“Yes,” I answered meekly.
“You know Ruby, Sawyer?” Anne asked, glancing back and forth between us.
I pushed off the bed and straightened my scrubs.
“No, I ran into her a few weeks ago, but we didn’t get the chance to meet,” Sawyer explained. “She ran off too fast.”
At that fact, Anne turned toward me with a look like she was about to reprimand me.
I squirmed in my shoes. “That was the day that Mr. Tennon had an accident on me, so I was in a rush,” I explained, knowing she’d recall that sordid tale.
Her brows nearly shot up to meet her hairline and her laughter rang out around the room. “What an interesting first encounter,” she said between laughs.
Interesting didn’t even begin to cover it.
“Well, I have to get back to work,” I said quickly, brushing past them and out of the door before anyone could continue the embarrassing conversation.
The third time Sawyer came to visit Anne, I finally got the chance to talk to him. I was down in the kitchen fixing a meal to bring up to Sandy, who didn’t “take her lunch in the dining halls” like everyone else. I was preparing her plate with all the specific things she’d requested (“I like a little bit of mustard on my sandwich, but not too much, and make sure the mustard is touching the turkey and not the cheese or I won’t be able to eat it”). Sawyer had come into the cafeteria to get some frozen yogurt for him and Anne.
I saw him out of my periphery, but I didn’t work up the courage to look at him.
“Ruby?” he asked with a confident half-smile.
I peered up at him as if shocked to see him. “Oh, hello!” I said, my voice an octave higher than it usually was.
He smiled wider. “Hi, I’m Sawyer, Anne’s grandson,” he reminded me.
He even reached his hand out to shake mine, that’s how polite and adorable he was. I was completely out of my element.
“Oh, yeah, I remember,” I said, reaching out to shake his hand and cringing when I saw a bit of mustard on my thumb. I pulled back just before our hands touched. “Mustard,” I said, reaching for a napkin and wiping it away.
He laughed as I held my hand out again.
“Want to try it one more time?” I asked, mostly because I just really wanted to touch him.
We shook hands, bouncing them up and down for what felt like five minutes before either one of us thought to pull away.
“I was going to tell you that I liked your new haircut the other day, but you ran off too quick,” he said as he put his hands in his back pockets.
“What — me? This — hair?” I could apparently say words, but stringing them into a coherent sentence was another thing all together.
Sawyer laughed and glanced down to his feet before turning back to the frozen yogurt machine.
“Well, I better go get some yogurt for my grandma or she’ll kill me.”
I cleared my throat and turned back to Sandy’s sandwich. “Okay, I’ll see ya.”
He gave me one more smile before leaving.
And that’s how it went for the whole first year that I knew him. He’d visit Anne at least once a week, usually on Thursdays. So for one year, every Thursday, I put on a little bit more mascara and made sure I didn’t have anything embarrassing in my teeth in the hopes of running into him. I’d try to bring him up to Anne as casually as possible and try to plans subjects we could talk about if he came to visit so that I wouldn’t look like a blubbering idiot.
Then one year after I first met him in the hallway, Anne broke the news to me that he had a girlfriend and my school-girl crush started to crack. I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter that he had a girlfriend since we hardly knew each other. But most days I’d wander through my shift at work and think about what it would be like if he suddenly appeared in front of me, single and ready to mingle.
It wasn’t easy to push him out of my mine, and I hated to admit that my crush had grown even more in the last year, but I’d kept it to myself.
It was hard to face him when he came to visit Anne. Every time I saw him, I feared his girlfriend would be by his side, but she never was. The whole time they dated, he never brought her to Paradise Springs.
But apparently now he was SINGLE again, and Anne decided to break that news to me three seconds before his arrival for the Halloween party.
Just great. I had no planned conversations, I hadn’t practiced talking to myself in the mirror in months, and I could have at least stashed my mouse ears under Anne’s bed.
I was going to have to kick some grandma ass.
Or yeah, maybe she’d kick my ass again. I wouldn’t test her.
I stood at the top of a ladder trying to hang balloons from the ceiling in the dining hall. The party was due to start in an hour, but no one had signed up for the decoration committee, which had left me as the only back-up available. I’d already blown up two dozen balloons and was feeling the effects of depleting all of my oxygen stores, but the old people needed balloons, because y’know maybe this would be their last Halloween and who was I to stand in the way of their death and one last night of geriatric partying.