SAINT PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
ONE MONTH LATER
“Anything eternal is probably intolerable.”
—CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
HERE HE COMES,” Jenny said. “Same time, every day.”
“Back off, he’s mine,” Mia told her. Jenny laughed, but Mia was not entirely joking.
They were behind the reception desk of Three Graces Nursing Home, watching the young man walk up the steps to the front doors.
He’d visited every day since he’d brought the old woman here. It was more a nice gesture than anything else. The old woman was too far gone to notice anyone. Her eyes were clouded with cataracts and she was mostly deaf as well. Not that she would have been able to respond. She was well on her way to the final stages of Alzheimer’s, unable to drag herself from old memories long enough to focus on anything in the present day. When Mia dressed her and bathed her every day, it was like handling a fragile paper doll.
No one was quite sure what her relation was to the guy, David Robinton. He looked nothing like her. He sat with her quietly, or sometimes read to her, or occasionally pushed her wheelchair on the paths around the manicured lawns of the facility.
Mia and the other nurses had taken an interest in him. Three Graces was amazingly quiet. Most of the patients were there to wait comfortably for the inevitable. Every few weeks, another one was taken away in the ambulance that always came to the back entrance and never used its lights or sirens. So David was a mystery she and the other staffers could use to pass the time. He was ridiculously good-looking, but that wasn’t all. Three Graces was not cheap. It was more like a high-end hotel than a hospital. There was no stink of urine or death, like some of the holding pens where Mia had worked before. The halls were spotless, the walls dotted with nice prints of Cézanne, Chagall, and Monet, and the rooms had fresh flowers every day. A singer came into the atrium and played a grand piano every afternoon. She knew that whoever he was, David was probably quite wealthy. And, on the forms he signed, she saw that he was a doctor of some kind.
She kept an eye on him while he visited. She was supposed to stay close to the patients, especially when visitors were around, to make sure that they didn’t need anything or have any medical emergencies. And if that gave her a little more time to talk with the nice, handsome, rich, young doctor, well, that wasn’t a bad thing.
Today, he didn’t leave the old woman’s room. She checked on them several times, and he only sat by her bed in the chair. She didn’t seem to notice he was there.
After an hour, he walked by the front desk to sign out. Mia came around the desk and stood close to him. He rubbed his eyes, wiping away the tears that had formed there. She saw that a lot.
“Same time tomorrow, David?” she asked.
“Same time,” he said.
“Good. It gives us something to look forward to,” she said. She leaned in closer. “It gets incredibly dull here. You’re the most exciting thing that happens all day.”
He laughed politely. “I’m not exciting. Believe me. I prefer the peace and quiet.”
“Oh, it’s good for the old people, sure. But after a twelve-hour shift, I could use a little more noise.”
And this is where you ask me what I’m doing after work, dummy.
But David just said, “See you tomorrow.”
She tried one more time. “It’s so nice of you to visit—your grandmother, I guess?”
David smiled at her and showed her his wedding ring. He didn’t say anything. Then he walked away, and out the door.
Mia was blown away. You arrogant bastard, she thought. Maybe she was flirting with him a little, but for him to assume that she was going to leap on him and desecrate his marriage vows right in broad daylight, that was truly a spectacular amount of ego.
She tried to shake off her irritation. It was time to deliver the meds.
She went to the old woman’s room first. Mia still had no idea how David was related to her, but now she didn’t care. She didn’t need to worry about someone that full of himself, that was for sure.
She never noticed that the old woman was wearing a wedding ring that matched David’s exactly.
Instead, she asked herself the same question she always did as she helped the old woman choke down her pills:
What kind of a name is Shako, anyway?