“If you get caught in the supply corridor during a safety drill, you’re a nurse who got turned around during the evacuation.You went the wrong direction.You look confused and apologize and walk back to your unit.Nobody questions a nurse in scrubs during a safety drill.”
“And if someone does question it?”
“Then I’m thirty-seven seconds away.”
“From where?”
“East stairwell.Second-floor landing.I’ve walked the route four times this week.Thirty-seven seconds at a normal pace.Twenty-two if I run.”
“You’ve timed it.”
“I’ve timed it.”
“Of course you have.”
She picked up the floor plan and folded it back into thirds along the existing creases.Then the timeline.Then the list of names.She slid all three back into the folder and pushed it across the table to him.
“What?”
“I’ve seen it.I have the route.I have the timing.I don’t need to spend another six hours staring at the paper.”
“Most people would want —”
“I’m not most people.Looking at it again won’t make me sharper.It’ll make me anxious.I want to spend the rest of today not anxious.”
He looked at her across the table.Then he picked up the folder, walked it to the entryway, and set it on the table by the door with his keys.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay.”
* * *
They didn’t plan the afternoon.It happened in pieces.
She did a load of laundry.He sat on the back porch step with his elbows on his knees, watching the yard, the way a man sits when he’s trained himself out of needing to fill silence.She brought him a glass of water at one point.He drank it without commenting on the fact that it was water and not something stronger, and she liked him for that — for not making a thing of being someone who didn’t drink the day before something dangerous.
She read for an hour on the couch with her feet tucked under her.He found a paperback on the shelf above the TV — a mystery she’d never finished — and read with her at the other end of the couch.They didn’t talk.The clock in the kitchen ticked.The afternoon light moved across the floorboards.
At three he got up and said he wanted to look at the latch on her front door.
“The latch is fine.”
“It sticks.”
“So does the second drawer in my kitchen.So does Wes Charles’s gate.You’re not fixing every sticking thing in Blossom Springs today.”
“Just the one that closes behind you when I leave tonight.”
She put her book down.
He worked on the latch for forty minutes.He didn’t ask her for tools.He had a small set in the truck — of course he did — and he came back in with a screwdriver and a tube of graphite and adjusted the strike plate by an eighth of an inch and worked the graphite into the bolt and tested it twice, and when he was done the door closed cleaner than it had since she’d moved in.
She watched him from the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.
“You don’t have to keep finding things to fix,” she said.
“I’m not finding things.They’re already broken.I’m fixing them.”
