2
We stood there for a minute, not saying anything. Then she shifted her bag around and gave me a long look, the kind she usually saved for interns about to make a mistake.
“Wes. When’s your next stretch off?”
“Starting tomorrow. Four days.”
“What are you doing with it?”
“Sleep. Gym.” I shrugged. “I need to go to Costco.”
“Costco,” she repeated, like I’d said something obscene. “Four days off and your biggest concern is going to Costco?”
“I’m out of paper towels, Roz.”
She stared at me a moment longer. Then she dug into her bag, came out with a pen and one of those little notepads the drug reps leave everywhere, and wrote something down. She tore off the page, folded it in half, and held it out.
“What’s this?”
“An address.”
I unfolded it. An address in the warehouse district, in her blocky handwriting. No name, no phone number, nothing else.
“What’s in the warehouse district?”
“A bathhouse.”
I looked up at her. She looked back at me, completely unbothered, like she’d just told me where to get my oil changed.
“What is this, Roz?”
“Just what I said,” she nodded. “A bathhouse. One of my boys is like you, gay as the day is long. He swears by it. Says it’s a great place to relax.”
I lifted an eyebrow, distracted just long enough for the tears to stop flowing. “Are you sending me to a sex club, Roz?” I shook my head. “Isn’t that a little… I don’t know… unprofessional?”
“I gave you an address, Callahan,” she said, not backing down an inch. “You can do what you want with it. But I need you to hear one thing first.”
“Here we go…”
“Shut your mouth and listen to me,” she commanded in that motherly tone she used with everyone that was dangerously close to getting on her nerves.
“I’ve been working this shift damn near my whole life. I know what it’s like to live in the dark that never ends. You forget how to be a person, how to laugh, how to do anything that feels normal.”
She let out a long sigh. “But I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I did, Wes. I missed my boys growing up and lost a lot of time with my husband that I’ll never get back. But you’re still young and you need to live a little bit. I know Mr. Okafor was nice,
but he shouldn’t be the closest thing you have to family in this place. That’s just not healthy.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but she held up a hand.
“I’m not done,” Roz said. “You think you’re fine because you’re good at your job and you show up and you do the work. But fine isn’t enough, Wes. Fine is what kills you slowly. You need something else. You need people, or hobbies,
or a reason to take a shower that isn’t because you’re about to go to work. You need to remember what it feels like to want something.”
The note felt thin and fragile in my hand. I looked down at it again.
“A bathhouse,” I said quietly.
“A bathhouse,” she confirmed. “You don’t have to go. But you should. My boy swears by it. And if you don’t want to go to that one, you should go somewhere else. Go to a bar. Go to a club. Go meet someone who isn’t bleeding or dying or scared out of their mind.
Just go somewhere that isn’t your apartment and find a way to feel alive again.”
She pushed off from the pillar and slung her bag higher on her shoulder.
“Your four days start tomorrow,” she said. “I expect you to do something with them besides Costco.”
Then she walked away, her footsteps echoing across the concrete, leaving me standing there with the address in my hand and the early morning cold settling into my bones. I looked at the note one more time, then folded it back up and shoved it into my pocket.
I got in the truck and wiped the tears from my cheeks.
I drove home as the sun climbed higher in the sky, painting the world in shades of orange and gold that I usually slept through.
The note felt like it was burning a hole in my pocket the whole way.
By the time I got to my apartment, I’d convinced myself I wouldn’t go.
It was absurd. It was Roz overstepping. It was?—
I pulled into my parking spot and sat there with the engine off, looking up at my building. The same brick facade I’d been staring at for six years. The same blackout curtains visible in my window on the third floor.
I took the note back out and unfolded it again.
The address stared back at me.
I sat there for maybe five minutes, just holding the folded paper, watching the morning light move across my windshield.
A jogger passed by in neon colors. Someone’s cat trotted its way across the parking lot.
The ordinary world going about its business while I sat in my truck trying to talk myself into staying home.
The truth was, I was tired. Not the good kind of tired that sleep could fix.
The kind that went all the way down to the bone, the kind that made everything feel like it was happening to someone else.
And Roz had seen it. She’d been standing in that parking garage like she’d been waiting for me to fall apart, and maybe she had been.
Maybe that’s what it meant to have someone actually pay attention.
I folded the note back up and shoved it in my pocket again.
But this time I didn’t turn the key in the ignition.
Instead I sat there, engine off, and let myself think about what it would feel like to walk into a place where people were alive.
Where they wanted things. Where they touched each other on purpose, not for a salary, but because they actually wanted to.
My phone buzzed. A text from one of the other night shift nurses. Heard about Mr. O. sorry man.
I didn’t respond. I just sat there watching the world wake up around me, listening to the tick of the cooling engine. Somewhere in the buildings around me, people were making breakfast. Making plans. Living.
I got out of my truck and headed up to the apartment.
I had one more shift until my stretch started.
Then, whether I liked it or not, I supposed I was probably going to take Roz’s advice.
It was time to get out in the world, to actually feel something for the first time in years that wasn’t just pure exhaustion.