THE PERSONNEL MANAGER was an older woman named Nora Blake. She wore a white summer suit and a perfume that Sweeney hadn’t smelled in twenty years. She filled out his paperwork in the basement cafeteria, where she bought him coffee from an antique vending machine.
The coffee was wretched but Nora Blake was delightful and Sweeney almost sprayed their table when she called Dr. Peck a vain little bastard.
“Do you talk like this to all the new hires?” Sweeney asked.
“I’m retiring in three months,” she said. “I’ve been at the Peck for thirty years. I’ve met a lot of arrogant doctors. But Peck is just a shit.”
“I wish I could disagree.”
Nora actually patted his free hand. “Not to worry, Mr. Sweeney. You’re working nights. You won’t see much of him.”
“You can just call me Sweeney,” he said. “Everyone does.”
“All right, Sweeney,” pulling a pack of Virginia Slims from a jacket pocket and lighting up. “You want to tell me why you asked to work third shift?”
He shrugged. “I’m a night owl.”
“Okay,” mouth working around the cigarette. “You want to tell me why you left the senior pharmacist position at the largest CVS in Cleveland to come to this nightmare?”
Sweeney sat back in the chair. It moved and the legs screeched a little against the linoleum.
“You’re really the personnel manager, right?”
“For another twelve weeks.”
“Why’d you stay for thirty years if it’s such a nightmare?”
“I got bored,” Nora said, contorting her lips to blow her smoke away from him, “living off the trust fund.”
“Ms. Blake,” Sweeney said, “I’ve never had a job interview quite like this.”
“This isn’t an interview. According to this,” indicating his paperwork with her cigarette, “you already got the job.”
He decided to let himself banter.
“You’re allowed to smoke in here?” he asked.
“This is the smoking section,” she said.
“I don’t see a sign, Ms. Blake.”
“When I’m sitting here,” Nora said, “it’s the smoking section. And knock off the Ms. Blake, all right? You make me feel like a stenographer.”
“Well,” Sweeney said and drained the last of the coffee, “you’ve sold me on the place so far.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” Nora said. “For another ninety days, anyway.”
She squinted at him through her smoke, shifted in her seat, and stifled a wince. Then she pointed at him with the cigarette and said, “In the beginning, I came here for the same reason you did.”
“Your son?” Sweeney asked.
She shook her head. “My husband, Ernie.” She threw out a hand and leaned toward him, an instant confidant. “He was a gorgeous man, let me tell you.”
“Your husband’s a patient?”
She smiled at him and he saw some of her lipstick had smudged across her front teeth. He wasn’t sure whether or not he should tell her.
“He was,” she said. “For almost twenty years. Industrial accident. He worked the line over at the Gordon Brothers. It was a slip and fall. We got a little settlement, but what am I going to do? Sit home and feel awful?”
“Twenty years,” Sweeney repeated.
Nora shrugged. “You know they can go that long. Don’t tell me you haven’t read all the books. That’s what the families do. We read all the books. We look for the answers. We become goddamned specialists, don’t we? Twenty years isn’t so unusual. Ernie was young and strong.”
Sweeney had nothing to say to that.
“You know, he didn’t hurt anything else. No broken bones. Just his head. The first doctor says to me It’s a fluke. If he’d hit the floor at another angle, who knows? A concussion. A week off from the mill. As if this is supposed to make me feel better. All these years later, I’m still frosted.”
Sweeney had a response to that. “Their job isn’t to make you feel better,” he said. “You find that out immediately.”
Nora saw the opening and used it. “How’d it happen to you? Your son, I mean. Do you mind me asking? I know some of the general details, but. .”
He did mind. He hated it every time and it never got easier. But he’d found a way to tell it. He’d made it into a story. Like a joke you’ve memorized so that you use the same words. The same tone and the same pauses with each telling. He took a breath, got himself ready.
“I was working,” he began and wished he hadn’t finished the coffee. “It was about seven o’clock. I’d gotten called in. The night shift guy — Anwar — he’d phoned in sick. I couldn’t get anybody. So Kerry was home alone with Danny. This was early summer and we’d just gotten the pool going. We’d had a barbecue on Memorial Day. Invited the neighbors. We were new to the neighborhood.”
But this wasn’t how he normally told it. Why did he mention the barbecue? He looked across the table at Nora, took another breath, and started again.
“Danny had just turned six that spring. Kerry had gotten him started with swimming lessons at the Y.”
The instructor had been nineteen. He couldn’t remember her name. She wore a red lifeguard’s suit and had blond hair, chopped at the neck. He’d made it to the lessons only that one time. The lifeguard had freckles and a tattoo on her ankle.
“And he loved it. He was a real waterdog.”
He remembered Danny in the girl’s arms. Holding these colored plastic rings in each fist. Danny would scoop them off the bottom of the pool. He was so light — thirty pounds on his sixth birthday — that the lifeguard had to help him dive down to grab the rings.
“You were at work,” Nora said, nudging him along.
“I was at work,” he said. “I must’ve filled a dozen asthma inhalers that night. The air quality was terrible all week. I had all these parents hovering in front of the counter. They haven’t had dinner, you know, and the kid’s gone from a wheeze to a real gasp.”
He sees the black woman, young, her first child, terrified. She can’t find her insurance card. She dumps her purse into her lap.
“And your wife,” Nora said, “was home with your boy.”
He felt the coffee start to churn in his stomach.
“He was in his pajamas already. Kerry had gone out to the patio to turn on the grill. She was going to throw a kabob on for dinner. She left the sliders open. And she went back in and poured herself a glass of wine.”
He stopped then and stared at the old woman in her white summer suit, with lipstick on her front tooth. He swallowed and changed his voice and said, “I’m sorry. Is there a restroom around here?”
Nora Blake motioned with her head.
“Turn left out of here and go to the end of the corridor.”
THE MEN’S ROOM was empty. He walked into a stall and closed the door. He put a hand across his mouth and tried to breathe through his nose. He felt his pulse hammering in his neck. He felt his bowels going loose and that instant jet of perspiration breaking under his arms and across his groin. He pulled down his tie, unbuttoned the shirt. The room tilted and he leaned against the green metal partition. He could smell something like bleach. Some old-fashioned disinfectant. Then the pain broke across his forehead and temples. His vision blurred. He bent, went down on one knee, and vomited.
Afterward, he splashed his face with cold water, washed out his mouth, and popped a peppermint candy. He bought the candies in bulk and always kept a half dozen in his pocket. He put a hand on the sink and steadied himself, then looked in the mirror. He rebuttoned the shirt and adjusted the tie.
He stood up straight, brushed at the knee of his pants, and walked back to the cafeteria. Nora Blake was still seated at their table, writing something in his employment file. She closed the file as he sat down.