The Colonel Came Home With Her Chapter 06
The next morning I checked out.
I didn’t go back.
I dropped Sam off with my mother in Millbrook for a week, and I went to Cape Fear Valley Medical Center to pick up temp work.
The head of Support Services was Mrs. Coleman, mid-fifties, gray hair pulled back in a tight bun, not a strand out of place.
She sat in her office, went through my resume, and looked up. “You did three years as a medic assistant at Womack Army Medical Center. Why are you looking for work now?”
I said my husband was dead.
Mrs. Coleman glanced at me, didn’t push it, closed the resume and set it down.
“One-month probation. If you make it through, I’ll write you a rec. There are a few employee housing units nearby you can apply for.”
I said okay.
The work wasn’t easy.
Seven in the morning to five-thirty in the afternoon, half an hour for lunch in between.
I was assigned to the inpatient floor as a nursing aide — pushing beds, changing sheets, running samples, helping the elderly to the bathroom.
Call buttons beeped all day. Cart wheels rattled down the corridor. Patients pressing bells, families arguing, monitors alarming — it never stopped.
By the end of my first shift my ears rang for half the night.
The first week I had three blisters on my hand — from the bed-push handle. I popped them with a needle, slapped Band-Aids on, and kept going.
The second week the blisters turned into calluses, hard little ridges in my palm.
The nurses on the ward were kind.
There was one named Susan who worked my floor — eight years in, could turn a corner with a cart without even looking down. She just felt her way.
The first day she watched me change a bed and said, You’ve never done this before, have you?
I said no.
She said, Don’t worry. Two weeks and you’ll be fine.
Two weeks later she watched me work and said, All right. You’ve graduated.
At the end of the month Mrs. Coleman called me into her office and said I could stay on.
Then she pushed a slip of paper across the desk with an address on it — the landlord of an apartment building across the street from the hospital. One bedroom, small balcony, cheap rent, laundry room downstairs.
I called. Signed the lease that afternoon.
I set up a little bed and a little table in the apartment.
That weekend I drove back to Millbrook to get Sam.
Fayetteville to Millbrook was over an hour by car. I caught a ride out with Susan, took a Greyhound back.
When I got there, my parents were on the porch, snapping green beans.
Dad saw me and stood up, still holding a handful of beans.
He looked at me a long time, his lips moving like he wanted to say something and couldn’t find the words.
I slept with Sam that night in the little bed of my childhood room.
The light in the next room stayed on late. I could hear my dad and mom talking, voices kept low. Couldn’t make it out.
The next morning, as I was leaving, my mom stuffed two Tupperware containers into my bag — one of pot roast, one of green beans.
She grabbed my sleeve. You’re really not going back.
No.
She said Ethan had come by the day before yesterday. He’d lost a lot of weight.
I laughed once, cold.
Her hand let go of my sleeve.
Jake had obviously passed on what I’d said. This whole crew of them who’d kept it from me — they had no right to try to patch this up.
Nobody in Fort Bragg family housing knew where I’d gone.
All they knew was Ethan had lost a lot of weight.
At meals, he didn’t talk to anyone. He’d grab a plate and eat in his office.
Captain Reyes went in to keep him company. He kept the door shut and wouldn’t open it.
Lily wasn’t doing well either.
One evening she suddenly crumpled to the floor, plate shattering, porridge spraying everywhere.
They took her to Womack. Found the fetus was malpositioned, and she was malnourished. They admitted her to the OB ward for observation.
She stayed three days. The attending said her blood pressure was too low, and if she wasn’t careful she might lose the baby.
Mrs. Miller went to the hospital to visit her, carrying a half-box of muffins, and sat at the bedside.
Lily was propped up on the pillows, her face as white as the sheets.
Mrs. Miller offered her a muffin, then asked her the question she’d been sitting on for two full months.
“Honey. You tell me the truth. Whose baby is that.”
Lily didn’t take the muffin.
She slid down under the covers and pulled the blanket up to her chin, covering half her face.
Mrs. Miller waited a long while. All she heard was the muffled sound of crying under the covers.
On her way back from the hospital, Mrs. Miller ran into Mrs. Harding in the laundry room.
They stood in front of the washers for a minute.
Mrs. Harding closed the dryer door.
The tumbler roared to life, drowning out everything else in the room.
“Diane. Do you still think that baby is Ethan’s.”
Mrs. Miller froze.
She stood there holding her laundry basket. A drop of water fell from a wet T-shirt onto her foot.
“Well then, you tell me. Whose is it.”
Mrs. Harding was holding her own white laundry basin — a couple of hand-washed shirts soaking, the sleeves hanging over the edge, dripping.
She looked at Mrs. Miller. Her face was flat but her voice was pitched half a step lower than usual.
“It’s not my place to say. But think about it. If Colonel Hayes had done something wrong, why would the whole battalion, top to bottom, be covering for him? You think that’s because I’ve got clout? Because he does? Neither. It’s because a dead man does.”
Mrs. Miller stood in the middle of the laundry room.
The water in her basin cooled from warm to cold in her hands.