After Hours (InterMix)(15)

“Ah.”

“When I was in my early twenties, somebody told me about a job in prison security, so I did that for a while. Long while—nine years, I think. I got along real good with the unstable inmates. Guess I got my old man to thank for all the experience dealing with irrational, belligerent *s. Eventually somebody hooked me up with my job at Larkhaven. Pays better than being a prison guard, and it’s less depressing. Sometimes it can feel like people are just wasting away on the ward, but not the way they do in a cell block.”

“I’ll bet.”

“What’d you do, before you came here? You said it’s your first clinical job.”

I told him about caring for my grandma. “I lived with her for about six years, and I got my LPN certification while I was doing it.”

“What’d you do before that?”

“Worked a bunch of retail jobs, saving up for when I figured out what I wanted to study,” I said with a shrug. “I’m only twenty-seven.” Twenty-eight tomorrow, actually, but I decided to round down.

He blinked, clearly surprised.

I laughed. “Oh, great. How old do I look?” How many miles had the day’s stress put on my formerly munchkin-like face?

“I hadn’t really thought about it.”

“Well, after today I feel about fifty, so no offense taken. How old are you?”

“Thirty-eight.”

I nodded. Ten years’ age difference wouldn’t bother me, had I been interested in Kelly. Which I didn’t want to be. I’d been heaped with at least a decade’s more adult responsibility than most of my peers. I had more to talk about with a guy Kelly’s age than some twentysomething dude. The years most people dedicate to getting wasted, I’d spent changing my once so strong and sharp and independent grandma’s diapers, soothing her night terrors. Trying to simultaneously support my mother and distance myself from her self-manifested drama. Then my sister and her chaos, her pregnancy . . . Just thinking about it, the whiskey in my hand took on a new appeal.

“You’ll do okay,” Kelly said after a long lapse. “Give it a week or two. You’ll scab over quicker than you think.”

“Ew. I’m not sure I want to, when you word it like that.” And the thought scared me, the idea that I’d get numb to the ward. I’d end up all hard and detached like Jenny and the other older staffers, not jaded, but . . . yeah, all scabbed over. Skin like tree bark. I sipped the liquor, suddenly appreciating how soft I usually felt.

“I’m not sure I want to stop feeling stuff,” I told Kelly.

“You still feel stuff. You just get good at choosing which provocations are worth getting upset over. And in the end, hardly any are. Your BS filters will be industrial grade. Month from now I guarantee if you get cut off in traffic, you won’t give half a shit.”

I pictured the guy he’d just run off, some stranger whose only crime had been trying to order Kelly’s coworker a drink. This philosophy clearly had some macho nuances I wasn’t grasping.

“Why won’t I care?” I asked. “Because I’ll know it’d be so much worse, getting my ear bitten off by somebody in the midst of a psychotic break?”

Kelly laughed and his smile caught me off guard. It changed his face, like clouds had broken and a big beam of Jesus-light had shot down from heaven to paint the world gold. Heat pooled between my legs, some latent bad-decision gland kicking in, one I’d always assumed I hadn’t inherited from my mother. Shit.

“Just trust me,” he said. “I know nothing I say tonight’ll make you feel anything but more freaked out, but you’ll be fine. You’ll find a balance.”

“Maybe I’ll find out I’m not cut out for this.”

“Maybe. But if you had the balls to see your grandma at her worst, probably take her to the toilet and bathe her and watch the woman you knew go away, years before she actually died . . .”

Get out of my head, Kelly Robak.

“You could be good at this,” he said. “And it takes about three good nurses to balance out the damage a single shitty one can do, so I’m hoping you’ll stick it out.”

His flattery warmed me like a blanket, draping me in the strangest sense of comfort. This gigantic, hardened man thought I had what it took to do his job.

And right then I decided, I hoped I did, too.

Kelly drained his bottle. “You signed up for restraint training tomorrow morning?”