4. Do No Harm, Take No Orders
Chapter four
Do No Harm, Take No Orders
NELLIE
Debbie Sue's living room smells like candle wax and queso, and there is a glass of wine in my hand that I did not pour and cannot seem to put down.
"Okay," Debbie says, folding her legs up under her on the couch. "House rules. What gets said at girls' night stays at girls' night, unless it's good, in which case I tell Tater and he tells the whole shift."
"Those are terrible rules."
"They're the only rules we have."
There are four of us. Debbie, me, Carmen from radiology, and a labor and delivery nurse named Pris who brought a dip with three kinds of cheese and the moral authority that comes with it.
I like them. That's the problem. Not even a month in and I like them, and liking people is how a town gets its hooks in you.
"So," Carmen says, scooping dip like she's being paid by the pound. "Nellie. Thirteen-week contracts. You ever renew?"
"Never."
"Never once?"
"Not once."
Debbie's watching me over her glass. She does this thing where she looks casual and isn't. I've seen her do it to patients who say they're fine.
"Why not?" Pris asks.
I could give them the resume answer. Better pay, new skills, keeps me sharp. I've given that answer in eleven states, in scrubs and in a white coat both.
Instead, the wine gives them a different one.
"My mama moved us a lot," I say. "New town, new boyfriend, new version of herself to match him. Wayne liked church, so we were church people. Rick raced dirt bikes, so suddenly I owned a helmet. Eleven schools in twelve years."
Nobody says anything. Pris stops mid-scoop.
"Every time one of them left, she'd fall apart like the floor went with him. Took me till high school to figure out the trick." I shrug. "You leave first. It's tidier."
"Tidier," Debbie repeats.
"Nobody packs your boxes but you."
Carmen laughs because I said it funny. I always say it funny. Pris laughs too, and the conversation rolls on to Pris's mother-in-law and a casserole dish that may or may not have been returned dirty on purpose.
But Debbie doesn't laugh. She looks at me one second longer, then tops off my glass without asking.
Filing it away. I know a chart note when I watch one get written.
***
Monday, and Mr. Kessler is in room 214 charming the day shift out of their pudding cups.
"There's my favorite," he rasps when I come in. His lungs still sound like a screen door but his color's good and his eyebrows are growing back.
"You say that to every nurse."
"I mean it different amounts."
I check his oxygen, his lines, the whiteboard where somebody has written GOALS: WALK HALLWAY, ANNOY STAFF. One of those has a checkmark.
Then I open his bedside drawer for his glasses and find the crime scene.
Butterscotch discs. A whole yellow bag of them, half gone, shoved behind the tissue box like contraband. Which it is. The man is diabetic and everyone in this building knows it.
"Mr. Kessler."
"Now hold on."
"Amos."
"He brings 'em," Kessler says, throwing his accomplice under the bus without one second of loyalty. "The big fella. Comes by every day after his shift. Sits right there and lets me tell the fire story with me as the hero."
"Is that so."
Mistake. His eyebrows are already climbing. He shifts up on his pillows like a man taking the witness stand.
"He come through that smoke like it owed him money.
Ceiling was talking by then. You know what a ceiling sounds like before it quits?
" He waits like I'm going to answer. "He knew.
Tore the tack-room door half off its hinges to get to me, put his own coat over my head, and walked me out of my own burning barn like we was leaving church.
" He settles back, satisfied. "You stitched the arm. He tell you how he got it?"
Barn had opinions. That's what he told me. Sitting on my table bleeding through a second dressing, more worried about this old man's oxygen than his own open arm, and the whole story he gave me was three words and a shrug.
He didn't. Of course he didn't.
I stand there holding the bag.
Every day. Nobody put that in a chart. Nobody announced it. The man who barked at my whole department like we were probationary firefighters has been sneaking in here every afternoon to sit with a lonely old farmer and smuggle him candy.
"He asks about my dog," Kessler adds. "By name."
"I'm confiscating these."
"You're as mean as he said."
"He said I was mean?"
Kessler grins, pleased as a cat, waiting to see what I'll do with that.
I do not ask what else he said. I take three butterscotch out of the bag, put them back in the drawer, and leave before my face does something unprofessional.
***
The face doesn't get to stay soft for long.
Two o'clock, I come around the corner to the nurses' station and there's a wall of firefighter standing at my counter with Kessler's discharge folder open in front of him like he owns it.
"—needs home oxygen for at least two weeks," Owen is saying to Trish, who is twenty-three and looks like she wants to climb into the chart rack. "And somebody checking on him daily. He lives alone, the house is a mile off the road, and if y'all send him home with a pamphlet and a prayer—"
"That's my discharge, and you're reading it wrong."
He turns. Sees me. Squares up like we're about to arm wrestle.
"Nurse Greer."
"Practitioner." I take the folder out from under his hand. "I wrote the plan you're standing there second-guessing. So, let's do it properly."
"His discharge plan is a joke."
"His discharge plan is home oxygen. Already ordered. Home health three times a week, and a follow-up with me on Thursday. I'm the one signing his orders, Peterson. Not a pamphlet. Me."
I flip it open to the page he never got to. "His niece from Abilene moves into the spare room Friday. It's all right here, on the page you had upside down."
A beat.
His jaw works. I watch him reload.
"The niece. Anybody vet the niece?"
"Did anybody vet the niece."
"People say they'll show up. Then they don't." His voice drops on it. Goes somewhere else for a second. "Then he's alone on a floor waiting on help that's across town."
And there it is again. That door slamming shut behind his eyes, same as when I asked about Chicago. Whatever is back there, it's load-bearing.
I should be kind about it. I'm a professional. I have training.
"Peterson." I keep my voice pleasant, which anyone who knows me knows is the danger setting.
"You ran into a burning building for that man, and it was the bravest thing this town has seen all year.
But you carried him out. My job starts where yours ends — and I'm better at mine than you are at guessing at it. "
Trish makes a sound like a teakettle.
"I'm not guessing, I'm—"
"You're reading a chart out of order and diagnosing from the hallway." I close the folder. "You want to actually help Amos? Stop bringing him butterscotch. Diabetic patient, Peterson. Room 214. Every disc you smuggle in there lands on my follow-up on Thursday."
His ears go red.
"He's seventy-two, let the man—"
"He's seventy-two and I intend to get him to eighty-two." I tuck the folder under my arm. "I've got his chart. I've got his orders. What I don't have is a reason you're still at my counter."
The whole floor has gone quiet. Two orderlies have stopped pretending to move a bed. Somebody's family member is filming us on her phone, I'd bet my license on it.
Owen looks at me. Long. There's a muscle jumping in his cheek, and underneath all of it, way down where he thinks nobody can see, something that is not anger at all.
"Thursday," he says. "You follow up personally."
"Every time."
"Good." He grabs his ball cap off the counter. "Then somebody competent's on it."
It is, I realize too late, the closest thing to a compliment I've been handed in weeks, and he's already stalking toward the elevator with his shoulders up around his ears before I can decide whether to be insulted.
Every person on this floor watches him go and then turns and looks at me like intermission ended.
"Show's over," I announce. "Chart something."
Nobody moves. Trish is fanning herself with a med sheet.
"Y'all fight like my grandparents," Kessler hollers from 214, where his door has been propped open the whole time. "They was married fifty-one years."
"EAT YOUR LUNCH, AMOS."
***
I'm still writing up my three o'clock vitals when the lobby doors open and a woman comes through them like weather.
Tall. Red hair to her waist, the kind you don't get from a bottle.
Green eyes doing a slow sweep of the floor.
She's carrying a stack of posters and a roll of tape, and everyone she passes lights up and says her name, so I know who she is before she reaches me.
The town has exactly one person like this.
"Rue Hawthorne." She sticks her hand out. "Starlight Hall. You must be Nellie."
"Word travels."
"Honey, word doesn't travel here. Word's already home with its boots off." She peels a poster off her stack and holds it up. "May I?"
The poster is gorgeous, which annoys me. String lights, a barn, block letters. FUNDRAISER FOR ENGINE 1. And under that, bigger:
BACHELOR LUNCH-DATE AUCTION. SATURDAY NIGHT.
"A bachelor auction," I say. "In this economy."
"For a fire engine. It makes people generous and stupid, which is my favorite combination." She tapes it to the wall by the vending machine, dead center, perfectly level on the first try. Then she turns around and looks at me.
Really looks. Head tilted a degree. The way I look at a rhythm strip.
"I heard there was a floor show up here today," she says.
"There was a professional disagreement."
"Mm." Rue smiles like I confirmed something. "Third one this week, I'm told."
"He keeps starting them."
"I'm sure he does." She gathers her posters back up, all warmth and business, but her eyes stay on me one beat too long. "Come Saturday, Nellie Greer. Everybody comes Saturday."
She's gone before I decide whether that was an invitation or a diagnosis.
***
Shift change. The station's crowded, day shift giving report, night shift stealing our good pens. Debbie perches on the counter beside me with her purse in her lap and that look on her face.
I know that look. That look has house rules.
"So," she says, loud enough to carry, and heads start turning down the whole station. "The auction's Saturday."
"I saw the poster."
"Every unmarried firefighter on that stage. Chief's orders." She unzips her purse, pulls out a mason jar, and sets it on the counter with a clink. There is already money in it.
"Debbie. What is that."
"And I'm starting a collection."
Every head at that nurses' station turns to me at once.
I lean in and read the tape. Debbie's fat happy handwriting, two words.
NELLIE'S BID.
That jar has been sitting in her purse. With money in it. Since before I knew there was an auction.
Debbie smiles at me the way she smiles at patients right before something's going to hurt.
"Saturday," she says. "Wear something you can lose your mind in."
"Hell no."
Debbie holds my eyes, folds a twenty, and drops it in the jar.