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The aunts and grandparents noted peculiarities about both twins, especially Lucy.
“Look how the child cringes when Lillian tries to pick her up,” Aunt Rita said. “She’s definitely got autism or something going on. Lil, you need to see her pediatrician and get some early intervention going for Lucy.”
If there was anything unusual about Lucy, her parents refused to acknowledge it. It was just safer to stay in denial.
Chapter 1
Isabel
Since I was a little kid, I wanted to be a nurse. I was in awe of a neighbor who left her house in the morning in green scrubs with a stethoscope and a laminated ID card on a lanyard around her neck. Two years ago, I graduated from Michigan State University with a bachelor of science in nursing. Science was easy for me. I did great in the biology and chemistry classes, even acing the nursing courses. Unfortunately, I couldn’t pass the state board exam. I took every prep class available, hired a tutor, and, on the advice of an advisor, retook a basic nursing course. Nothing helped.
Honestly, I believe that the reason I couldn’t pass the test is because watching people suffer was too much to bear and not passing was the only way I could get out of having to take a nursing job.
In my senior year, during the rotation through all the different services, I realized I disliked patient care with a passion. I could see how easy it would be to make a mistake—give the wrong drug, accidentally hit a nerve when doing an injection. The list grew with each passing day.
My instructors did everything they could to help me find my niche, focusing on psychiatric nursing or peds or even memory care, which I hated the least.
“Well, let’s focus on nursing care of older adults. Maybe that’s your forte,” they said.
Somehow, I graduated, but when it was time to take the state boards, I just sabotaged myself.
“Bella, you graduated near the top of your class,” my friends told me. “There’s no reason for this.”
The relief was overwhelming. My advisor got me a job in a nursing home as an extern, but I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to be responsible for a human life.
My parents were appalled, my father so angry he couldn’t speak to me for months. My older siblings pampered me. My mother shook her head and said, “I give up.”
“You have to work,” my father said. “Find some way to support yourself.”
George Roman is a successful concrete guy. That’s what they call him. He’s the contractor and owns the company, but he’s still known asthe concrete guy. Roman Concrete is a big employer in the city. We kids sort of ended up with targets on our backs, having to be on our best behavior because Big George Roman wouldn’t settle for anything less. It eventually backfired, but that’s a story for later on.
Anyway, I found a job right away. My parents were furious, but at least, at age twenty-four, I’m working. You know those kiosks at car washes? You drive up, and the attendant takes your money and programs in the services you want. Well, that’s my job.
About the same time I got the job, my former nursing school buddies who had passed the state boards and were all working at nursing jobs in Detroit invited me to live with them. They were renting a four-bedroom house, and I’d get my own room. I loved them, and they were nonjudgmental and protective of me.
I moved out with my childhood bedroom furniture, my computer, and the stuff I had collected while I was in college and away from the Romans’ continuous disapproval.
Let me tell you about my roommates. We called ourselves the four date-dodgers when we were in college.
Brian from Utah lived in the room next to Dale and me. He’s gorgeous, with huge blue eyes and curly black hair, built like a model with a flat stomach and just enough muscles to prove he was comfortable at the gym but not a gym rat. Sadly, Brian was perpetually heartbroken. He got through the first year unscathed, but the second, he wound up in student health with a panic attack when he saw his boyfriend with another guy. By the third year, he’d given up looking and focused on doing what he could to make good on his scholarship so he could graduate and stay in Michigan afterwards.
The faithful computer matched me with sweet Dale, another Detroiter, to be roommates from freshmen year on. I was so thrilled to have another nursing student as my roommate that I nearly cried when we introduced ourselves. Dale studied twenty-four-seven to pass every test, but she led every study group and researched topics we struggled with until the issues were clarified. At five eleven and a half, Dale towered over most of us, but she always seemed to be at our eye level. There was just something comforting about Dale.
From the Bronx, no-nonsense Casey was another who said she had to make a success of nursing school because she wasn’t leaving Michigan after graduation. She roomed on an upper floor, but we wanted her with us, so we made space and got a cot for her. Casey was the schedule keeper who made sure her support group got in the same clinical rotations she was in. We didn’t know how she did it, but the four of us were never far from one another.
The dilemma. Our fellow nursing students must have had more energy or been better organized than we were because most of them continued to have social lives or made time for their families. Not us. And especially not me. I spent every moment that I wasn’t in class or at the hospital with my nose in a textbook. I envied my classmates who made plans to party on the weekends and who actually dated.
During the two-week break in the summer, when my roomies were committed to return home, I’d go to my parents’ house at the lake with a suitcase of paperback novels and devour every word, none of it related to nursing or science or medicine. I had the greatest admiration for classmates who were married and had children to care for, or worked jobs, or both. How did they ever get the work done? All I had to do was study, and even that seemed almost impossible to accomplish.
Back to the job. My job is great. I can sit on my stool with earbuds in place and listen to audio books all day long. I should say night. Yep, this car wash is one of the few around here that is open until midnight, and that’s my shift. It was the only shift available when I applied for the job, and a year later, Skippy, my boss, offered a transfer to day shift, and I said no thank you. In the first place, he’s there all day long with the owner, Frank, working at the convenience store and attached gas station, managing the workers in the car wash. I don’t need the boss breathing down my neck.
So, nights it is. I’m content to stay at Busy Bee Auto Wash, too. I don’t have the desire to go back to school for something else, or to take the boards again. My father is still furious. He just can’t let it go.
At least he couldn’t until the big accident.
I’d backslid slightly, looking at the underwear department on eBay on my phone. There she was, my favorite vendor, Pricilla of eBay. We’d gotten to be close friends over the years; her husband had had a stroke, and she was the sole support, selling frillies, bras, panties, and everything in between.
Oh. I’d better explain about the underwear thing.
