Love, Cutter

Chapter 6

Chapter 4

KINLEY WAS ONLY THIRTY minutes into her shift and already she needed a minute to breathe, so she ran down to her regular spot, the hospital coffee shop.

The conversation she overheard in the nurses’ station kept replaying in her mind.

“They say he tried to off himself because his dad was pressuring him to take over the business or something.” One of them said.

“Nope, it was a girl. I heard his sister talking on the phone and she said he was supposed to marry this one girl his whole life,” another nurse chimed in. “Then, he dumped her. His parents got so mad at him they threatened to kick him out of the family. That’s what happened.”

“You need to stop talking about people.” Big Bertha boomed through the nurses’ station, “It’s neither one of your jobs to be in somebody else’s business or judging anybody up in here,” she tisk-ed, “especially when I know at least one of you got a bill collector calling every other day and another one got either her boyfriend or her side piece calling every five minutes. You want to be talking about somebody else? Now you three girls are new to my unit, but let me tell you I am the one who passes out the nicknames around here and when I do, they stick. I promise, neither of you want the ones I’ve come up with so far.” Big Bertha tells it like it is. She’s tough; the den mother of the fifth floor nurses’ station. If it weren’t for her, Kinley may have lost her cool, which wasn’t something she did often.

“Okay, that will be five dollars and twenty cents, Kinley.”

If she didn’t live on coffee throughout the day, she’d never sleep at night. Something about the balance: loads of caffeine, then crash. It works.

“Thank you, Lisa,” she says to the hospital coffee shop barista, before asking her now daily question, “Do you think Black and Pearl will be in today?”

“I don’t know. She hasn’t been here in a few days, but we’re hoping.” Lisa wrinkles her nose in excitement.

Kinley peered around the coffee shop to look for a certain familiar face.

“Keep the change,” Kinley offered.

Many people don’t tip, but Kinley worked too hard through college and learned the overall value of those tips. Sometimes that was all she had to make ends meet. Back then she never would’ve bought a five dollar cup of coffee. Not when she could make it at home for pennies. Kinley always got pretty good grades, but she never gave school her all, and it took a while and few problems for her to realize she could apply herself and use her pain to help someone else. Put her anger to good use. Well, she didn’t come to that epiphany on her own, Grams helped her see that there may not always be a reason for everything, but you can choose to take something good out of anything.

“Thank you so much.” Lisa winked. “How’s it going today, Kin?”

“Today is a good one, I can feel it.” Kinley smiled back at her.

She sat down and observed. It was one of her favorite things to do. People watch. Originally she wanted to be a psychologist to help others survive their own grief, but nursing school was shorter and would put her in less debt, and she could still help people while making good money. Kinley never regretted that decision.

Until now. There was nothing she could do to help Carter anyway, past being a good nurse to him. She has known the same pain that pushed him this far. She can’t explain why she feels connected to this stranger, but he has her thinking about why she became a nurse in the first place. Kinley’s worked so hard to use her own pain to help others. So how can she help him? What would change for him if he wakes up tomorrow? What would stop him from trying again? She knows that the hardest part is the grief. It never really goes away. She had expected to one day wake up and feel good again. Whole. Happy. In ways, she has found some happiness, but that never replaces the grief. The grief never dies. Once he wakes up, as she knows he will, then what?

Kinley sipped her coffee and watched the same middle-aged man sitting in his corner, reading the newest self-help book he started two weeks ago. Then there was the newest barista, who was probably the youngest worker in the hospital, sitting sideways in her chair by the window, chugging her frozen coffee and listening to her music perhaps slightly too loud… Maybe someone needs to tell her that those headphones are only sound-proof to the listener. In walked Pearl. Kinley watched as she sat three tables down from Black. Pearl looked intently at her phone, as usual. She always came into the room wearing the same sweet, jasmine perfume and wearing the same vintage pearl necklace. Kinley knew they’d both be here today, she could feel it. She knew why. And they knew why. One day, she thought, one of them will get the nerve. Who knows? They might even be soul mates.

***

Listening to his mother and father talking about him made Carter recall a particular time at the dinner table when he was younger. Everyone was talking about business. Of course he was only eleven, but that didn’t matter, he was expected to understand business all the same.

“So Carter, what do you think about the price of corn?” his brother asked, and everyone except his mother laughed.

“Stop asking him those types of questions, Daniel. You make him feel inadequate.” His mother reached across the table, bridging the far distance between them. Carter noticed, of all things, that his mother’s sleeve was hovering dangerously close over the gravy dish.

“Don’t listen to them my baby,” she patted his arm, “you’ll find your place one day. You always did struggle with things such as numbers and equations. That’s okay, maybe you’d enjoy art. I’ve read that a lot of premature babies are more inclined toward art than numbers.” She patted his arm again and he watched as her sleeve took a dive into the brown liquid.

“Stop it, stop babying him, Susan!” His father’s hand slammed against the table, “He’ll never be anything with the way you baby him. Hard work, that’s what he needs. If he would listen to that tutor we spend so much money on and apply himself he might make something of himself. Art is not a way to make a living.”

“Dear,” she squeezed Carter’s arm, “do what you can... You can only do what you can.”

It struck him the most that he didn’t know at that moment if he was thankful that her attention was more on him than her own propriety for reaching over food, something she’d hammered into them through the years, or if he was saddened by it. It was unlike her to let what was proper etiquette fall by the wayside of anything else, except pity. That’s why he was unsure of his feelings at the time. Did she care more for him than society rules, or pity him more than respecting the social directives?

Either way, the result was the same. He was inadequate. That day he knew he would never be able to change his failures. They were mandated in his premature birth.

So be it.