Life Happens by Danny Moon – Chapter 1
Chapter One
The fast-paced chaos of a multiple-injury automobile accident on Interstate 20 earlier in the day slowly wound down. There were no fatalities, but two of the victims would be spending a few days in St. Matthew’s until their fractures healed enough for them to be released.
Lauren Miles leaned on the circular countertop surrounding the nurses’ station. Sighing, she puffed a wisp of chestnut brown hair out of her eyes. The emergency cases were always tiring, but she thrived on the excited atmosphere. Now, after things calmed down and the more mundane rituals of dispensing medications and taking blood pressures filled her hours, she quickly succumbed to boredom. She reached for a stack of charts.
A heavy-set nurse in her fifties looked up from where she sat behind the counter. “Mr. Thompson in 315 needs to have his dressing changed, Lauren.”
Lauren nodded and started down the hall to her left. “Okay, Gail, I’ll get it as soon as I do the medication round.”
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Gail called out. “you had a phone call while you were assisting in the ER.”
Lauren half-turned. She never received calls on the job. “Who from?”
Gail held up a pink slip of paper; and squinted through her bifocals. “Cathy, it looks like. Some of the nurses write worse than doctors. There’s a number for you to call.”
A quizzical frown creased Lauren’s forehead. She retraced her steps, took the message from Gail’s outstretched hand, and read the telephone number. The area code told her it was, indeed, from her sister, Cathy. She stuffed the note in pocket of her white uniform and went about her duties, wondering irritably what Cathy needed. And to be sure, she needed something. She never called otherwise.
The sisters, ten years apart in age, had never been close. Cathy ran away with a boy she hardly knew soon after graduating from high school. Lauren was only ten at the time, but she realized her parents were devastated by Cathy’s hasty departure. She remembered her mother crying and her father stomping red-faced and angry back and forth across the living room . . .
“If I get my hands on that Gary—”
“Where could they go, Frank? We know nothing about him,” Olivia Miles sobbed.
“We know he was smart enough to get Cathy to go off with him . . . not that he would need much intelligence for that. She’s always believed everything she was told. I . . . I used to call her ‘Chicken Little’, remember? You could tell her the sky was falling and she’d cross her arms over her head. Always so gullible and easily led.”
Two weeks went by before Cathy called to tell her parents she and Gary were married and living in Oklahoma— and needed a loan. “Just until Gary finds a job, Daddy. We’ll pay you back, I promise. I’m real happy and Gary loves me a lot. We just need a little help, Daddy,” she pleaded in her rapid-fire way of speaking, like an exuberant child. Frank Miles refused to help, but Olivia managed to send her daughter small amounts of cash from time to time, unbeknownst to her husband.
After a while, life around their home returned to some semblance of normalcy. Frank trudged off before daylight every weekday morning to his job at General Energetic, a defense contractor, where he was a welder, and spent his free time in the beloved hothouse he built himself, in their back yard. Olivia went about the task of raising Lauren, determined not to make the mistakes she had made with Cathy.
She soon learned, however, that her younger daughter required little direction. A no-nonsense girl who excelled in school, Lauren despaired of frivolous hobbies or stupid people and knew she wanted to be a nurse from the time she was eleven years old. Her room and her life were orderly.
She would straighten pictures on the wall and even up the ends of the bathroom towels after her father left them draped haphazardly on the towel rack. Independent, self-sufficient, and embarrassed by displays of affection, Lauren continually caused her mother to wonder how her two daughters, so different, could both be products of her womb.
Olivia could not know the effect Cathy’s elopement, and the distress it caused, would have upon Lauren’s young mind.
Cathy called infrequently over the years, always to announce some change in her life. Gary had left her high and dry after two years, but she met the nicest boy and they were getting married and moving in with his folks in Louisiana as soon as her divorce came through. A year later she called to tell her parents she was pregnant.
Frank was unswayed by this news. He hardened his heart toward Cathy and refused to even speak to her. Olivia, of course, bubbled at the thought of being a grandmother. She continued her tithe to Cathy, hoping the extra money would provide a better life for her little girl and the grandchild who was on the way.
Cathy and her new husband, Lloyd Radski, came to visit for the weekend when the baby, Jennifer, was a year old.
It was not a joyful reunion.
Cathy weighed in thirty pounds heavier than when she left home and carried the dark remnants of a bruise beneath her left eye. Lloyd bespoke trouble. A tall, lanky man with greasy black hair, bad teeth, and a noticeable lisp, he indelicately scratched himself in public.
While Olivia cooed over the baby, Frank took Lloyd out back, under the pretense of showing him the hothouse. Once they were alone, Frank turned to face his son-in-law. “What do you do for a living, Lloyd?”
“Mechanic, mostly.”
“Still living with your parents?”
“Yeah. Just my mama, though. Daddy passed on last year,” Lloyd said, sipping from the beer can in his hand.
“You give Cathy that mouse under her eye?”
Lloyd shrugged, smirked. “Sometimes she riles me.”
Frank’s big hands knotted into fists at his side. His eyes narrowed. “Listen, you ignorant piece of trash,” Frank hissed. “you touch her or that baby again and I’ll be on you like stink on manure. You got that, boy?”
Lloyd sipped his beer. “She said you was hard to get along with. I think we’ll be goin’ now.”
Within minutes Lloyd hustled his perplexed wife and Jennifer to his twelve-year-old Chevrolet and drove away in a cloud of dense blue exhaust fumes.
Olivia did not speak to Frank for three days, angry that he cut short Cathy’s visit.
The collect calls from Cathy came periodically, always needing help. The baby needed clothes. She needed money to bail Lloyd out of jail on a petty theft charge. She needed, she needed. Then began a transitory life that led her to Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina—farther and farther from her family in Texas.
She came home once more—the day of her mother’s funeral—after being summoned by Lauren. Jennifer was, by then, a sad-looking child of eight.
Frank, stricken by the loss of his wife to the cancer she’d fought so valiantly for three years, would not allow Cathy, Lloyd, and Jennifer to stay with him. When they failed to attend the funeral, Frank put them out of his life forever.
•
All of this replayed in Lauren’s mind as she tended to patients. She thought several times of tossing the note from Cathy in the trash. Instead, she decided to return her sister’s call during her next break. It was not in her nature to put off matters, no matter how unpleasant the circumstances. “Deal with it,” was her unspoken motto.
As she left a patient’s room she collided with Ben Tolson, one of the staff physicians. “Whoa, pretty lady,” he said, smiling down at her. He caught her elbow. “When are we going to have that dinner I keep offering you?”
Lauren bridled at his touch. For months he’d pestered her to go out with him. “I’m really busy, Doctor Tolson—”
“You’re always busy—that’s why you’re one of our best nurses. But that doesn’t answer my question.”
“Doctor—”
“Come on, Lauren. Just dinner and conversation. Let me get to know you,” Tolson insisted.
Lauren jerked her arm free from his grasp and slipped past him. He stood there, watching her hurry away down the hall.
Her heart pounded. Dr. Tolson was an attractive man. A man obviously interested in her. Part of her wanted to take a chance—go out with him and have a normal relationship. Another part of her, however, lived in fear of men. She never dated in high school and only twice while in college. Neither boy asked her out again, turned off by her cool indifference.
She equated men with the problems Cathy brought upon her family. The neurosis improved after a year of analysis. Now, on a conscious level, she realized Cathy made her own problems. On another, in the deep well of her psyche, formed in her childhood, she feared a relationship with a man would bring the same disastrous results it did for Cathy.
Lauren angrily wiped away the tears that slipped from her eyes. Of all the people Cathy had hurt, Lauren suffered the most.
Leaving the smell of alcohol and illness behind for half an hour, Lauren stepped into the nurses’ lounge, their sanctum from the life and death dramas unfolding continually within the five-hundred bed, ultra-modern hospital. She dropped coins in a vending machine and pushed the diet cola button. Taking an empty chair, she fished for her cellphone, then propped her aching feet on an adjacent chair.
She had just begun dialing Cathy’s number when the door opened and Donald Arrington, a nurse in his thirties, entered the lounge. His hospital whites were, as always, spotless. The creases of his slacks looked sharp enough to inflict serious injury. A thatch of chest hair the color of corn silk curled from the V neck of his tunic. “Good afternoon, Lauren. Resting the doggies?” he asked, shaking the chair her feet rested upon.
He loomed over Lauren. She thought for the hundredth time there was no other description for Donald except “hunk.” Six-two, 200 pounds of well-developed male with wide-set blue eyes, full lips, and a jawline lesser men would kill for. That he preferred other men often depressed her. Not that she harbored any intolerance for his lifestyle— it just seemed like such a loss to the sisterhood of women. “Hi, Donald. Pulling a double?” Lauren asked, having seen Donald assisting in the OR when she came on duty at seven A.M.
Though every hair on his head was in place, he smoothed it back with his palm. “Why? Do I look disheveled?”
“No, dear . . . you’re perfect. I saw you when I came in this morning.”
He nodded. “Someone called in sick, so I covered their shift. I can always use the extra money. You going to use that phone, or do you just like to caress it?”
Lauren had stopped dialling and was just holding the cellphone cradled in her hand. “Making a call I don’t want to make. My sister called.”
Donald grimaced. He knew all about Cathy from the many conversations he and Lauren shared. The proverbial bad penny. “Do you know what she wants this time?”
Lauren exhaled. “No,” she said, dialing the rest of Cathy’s number and pushing Send, “but I’m about to find out.”
