“Um…thanks.”
She winked. “Good luck.” Then she was gone.
Needless to say, my adrenaline buzz was basically gone by 10:05. I paced from room to room, making the familiar circles and seeing the familiar faces. I liked my job—don’t get me wrong. It’s just… I had been at the same facility for about three years now and I hoped that I would have gotten an acting gig by now. Hospice was in no way a permanent position. Patients were divided into two main categories: the people who had been shunted by the health care system and were temporarily using us as a recovery center due to budget cuts, and the people who came here not to recover, but to die.
Either way, no matter how many people you got to know, you wouldn’t end up knowing them very long.
Amanda would ask me about it all the time. She didn’t understand how I could spend my entire life around death and the dying. I was the person in the patient’s life who would see them through to the end, providing palliative end-of-life care. And I wanted to make their last days comfortable. I wanted to be that trusted and nurturing guide, helping patients and families find comfort and dignity. But no matter how many ways I found to describe it, she’d always end up saying that it sounded like a Stephen King movie and demand we talk about something else.
I pushed opened open a door and Mrs. Diaz, a woman I’d talked to every day for the last eight months, asked me my name. I closed it behind me with a sigh.
It was going to be a very long day.
When I finally got home and pushed shut the door of the apartment, Amanda sprang up to greet me like she hadn’t been imitating The Walking Dead all morning.
“How was work?” she asked cheerfully.
I pulled off my scarf and let my purse fall to the floor. I handed her the bag with the stuff she had asked me to buy. “Work was fine.” I felt like I’d given her the same answer to the same question for the last thousand years. It was definitely time for a change. “I got thrown up on.”
“That’s awesome!” she exclaimed, blatantly tuning out everything I was going to say as she waited impatiently for her own turn to speak.
I stifled a smile as she bounced a foot up and down, her heavily charcoaled eyes bursting with excitement. “Why, Amanda, how was your day?”
“I GOT A CALLBACK!” she shrieked.
My mouth fell open, and she danced from side to side like a deranged bobblehead.
“I know! It was for that dystopian Western thing. I’m going to be…” she paused for dramatic effect, “Hot Ranch Chick Number Seven.” She pulled the tequila out of the bag and smiled. “I’m going to celebrate with this! I can’t believe I got this gig!”
“That’s amazing,” I breathed, imagining the possibilities. “And to think, I could have been number eight.”
“No, their quota for white girls was filled,” she said practically. “To be number eight, you’d have to be Asian.”
“Oh.” I mulled this over for a second before saying, “Congratulations! I’m so proud of you!”
“Thanks! And thanks for stopping by the store.”
“Not a problem. Oh my gosh!” I suddenly remembered. “I saw a fight today!”
“Wow,” she raised her eyebrows, looking impressed. “Your first genuine fisticuffs. What was it about? Was it gang-related?”
“It was over a parking spot,” I said impressively. “Well, actually I stopped it before they came to blows…but I’m sure it was headed that way.”
She gave me a long look. “So you finally see the makings of a fight, a long-standing life ambition, but you stop it before it can actually get there?”
I felt as though I literally deflated. “...yeah, I guess so.”
She patted me sympathetically on the shoulder. “Come on, I ordered Chinese.”
“Thank you. I’m starving!”
I followed her into the kitchen and was shocked to discover an elaborate setup. She’d pulled out our finest silverwear, and for once, we weren’t eating on paper plates. There was even a chipped tea light or two for ambiance.
“What the—”
She clicked a button and Florence and the Machine started screeching in the background.
My eyes narrowed and I turned to her suspiciously. “All this for Hot Ranch Chick Number Seven?”