I’ve been paying rent since I was nineteen. Going to school while working full-time since I was twenty. Balancing doctor appointments and teacher conferences while taking care of my younger siblings.
Evan’s only ever taken care of himself. He’s never even had a goldfish—I asked.
So it’s hard to be interested in someone who looks like a man and talks like a man . . . but for all intents and purposes, is still just a boy.
Put an Xbox remote in his hand and I bet he could talk shit with all the other twelve-year-olds.
And it’s not just him. There are a lot of Evanses out there these days.
I’m pretty sure I’ve gone out with most of them.
“So, Violet, you’re an emergency room nurse?”
“Correct.” I nod.
He raises his glass. “The noblest of professions. Tell me about your most intriguing case. Any snake bites or flesh-eating parasites?”
Lakeside is a small town. If the hospital just treated the locals, the majority of cases would be sports injuries, allergic reactions to beestings, fishhook impalements—maybe an occasional heart attack. Or a vengeful food poisoning courtesy of a wife who’s been unappreciated one time too many.
That actually happened last month. Mr. Learner forgot his and Mrs. Learner’s 30th wedding anniversary and he called last minute to ask her to cook a big dinner for him and his fishing buddies after a long, hard day of chasing the bass around the lake.
It was ugly.
Mrs. Learner made Mr. Learner a “special” dish—just for him. It didn’t kill him, but for the couple hours he had to be treated for dehydration, he was wishing it did.
“We’re a level two trauma center,” I tell Evan. “So we get our share of car accidents, compound fractures, stabbings, head injuries, infections . . . and people with stuff stuck up their butts.”
Evan’s glass pauses halfway to his mouth.
“You’re joking.”
“Not even a little.”
From beer bottles to Barbie dolls, you would not believe the things people attempt to stick up their asses. And then can’t get back out again.
It’s called vacuum suction and word needs to be spread about it, far and wide.
For all our sakes.
I put my napkin on my empty plate. “But probably the most unique case I’ve ever seen was a patient who came in with twisted testicles.”
“Twisted? Is that . . . is that even possible?”
“Sure—it’s called testicular torsion.” I form a fist with one hand, demonstrating. “One testicle wraps itself around the scrotum, cutting off the blood supply. It typically presents in adolescents and is extraordinarily painful . . . ”
“I bet.” He grimaces.
“But this patient was in his forties and the crazy part is—he didn’t feel anything at all. It was a medical anomaly. Dr. Daniels—he was the attending on the case—thought it was due to how the nerve was compressed from the swelling.”
Evan gulps. “Swelling?”
“Oh yeah, they were like grapefruits. And getting bigger by the second. We were able to do a manual detorsion, otherwise the scrotum could’ve split right down the middle.”
I slice my hand down—and that’s when I notice my date’s skin has a mint-chocolate-chip-ish hue—pasty pale and slightly green. But I’ve gone too far to stop now, might as well finish the story.
I lower my hands to my lap. “But it was only a temporary fix. When the surgeon got in there, she had to—”
Evan turns away, cutting me off midsentence. Then he lifts his finger toward our waiter.
“Check, please.”
* * *
And that is how I end up back home alone. Before 9 p.m. On a Saturday night.
It’s becoming a trend. And I don’t really care. Sometimes I worry that I probably should care, because I’m in the prime of my life with my biological clock tick-ticking away. Blah, blah, blah.
But then . . . I just don’t.
In my defense—my house is the fucking bomb, and there’s no place else I’d rather be. It’s a completely adorable one-bedroom cottage, next to the lake with ivy up the south wall and these arched doorways and built-in shelves, with a stone fireplace that’s straight out of a storybook. It’s like living in Snow White’s cottage without the burden of the seven dwarfs. I got a pretty decent rate on the mortgage, all things considered, and in twenty-nine short years, this baby will be all mine.
And though I live alone, “lonely” is not in my nature.
I set my wineglass on the kitchen table next to my laptop, pull up the FaceTime app with the tap of a few buttons, and the beautiful faces of two of my closest college friends—Aubrey Stewart and Presley Cabot—appear.
I was only at Boyer University for my first year before I had to go back home to Delaware when my mom got sick. I transferred to a local community college and ended up going into nursing—but the months I spent tucked away in Port Hudson, New York, were some of the best of my adolescence.