I know. Man Flu. It’s a thing.
But he’s my best friend. Even if he did pull me away from that Hot Doctor at Lonnie’s bar last week.
We’ve been here three years now, and we’ve gotten pretty close to the other girls at Halo, too. Everybody’s looking forward to our night out.
I comb through the client’s curls with my fingers and give her a spritz of hairspray, and then I’m done. We all smile and wave her out the door, and then we’re out the door too, heading to our favorite casual dinner place.
“I’m starving!” Makayla says. “Pizza rolls?”
“Mozza sticks,” Tyra suggests.
Wade puts his hands on his stomach. “Are you trying to make me fat? No. We’re doing wings and celery sticks, and I will eat all the celery sticks.”
“I want crab puffs,” I tell them as we settle into the Uber.
“Oh god, you’re gonna make me puke,” Wade says. He looks queasy.
I lean over and whisper in his ear. “Are you sick? Do you want to just go home?”
“No, Junebug, I wouldn’t miss this. I have looked forward to our night out all week,” he insists.
At Charlie Shark’s, we get a combo appetizer platter with everything and a pitcher of margaritas, and we toast Makayla and Dillon. We wind up talking engagement rings and wedding venues and flowers, and gradually I notice that Wade is getting quieter and quieter. Which is not like him.
I tap him on the leg, under the table. He looks at me without moving his head, and his face has gone a peculiar grayish-green color. “Did you eat something weird?” I ask, under my breath. “Like some leftover takeout that got shoved to the back of the fridge or something?”
“No,” he groans, hunching forward over the table.
“Did you eat anything tonight?”
“Just a couple of crackers. My stomach hurts, June. I mean, it really hurts.” He points vaguely at his belly button. “There. Or maybe on this side of it. No, in the middle more.”
I’m no doctor, and I’m getting worried.
“Hey . . . How many margaritas did you have?”
He thinks. “Two? I think two glasses. God, don’t make me think about it. I shouldn’t have had any,” he whines.
I put my hand on his forehead. It’s cool. No fever.
He puts his head on the table, and Makayla and Tyra look at me, shocked.
“Wade, I think we better get you home.”
“Noooooo,” he wails, but he does it into the table. That settles it.
“Okay, I am calling an Uber.” He nods without looking up, and that’s when I know he’s really sick.
Fifteen minutes later, the Uber is pulling up outside, and Wade is puking his guts out on the ground by the front door, and sort of moaning every time he vomits. When he finally loses what there seems to be of the margaritas, I can see that he’s crying, and that scares me. In ninth grade, Jason Woodruff and Ty Miller cornered Wade in the cafeteria and called him a fag, and took turns punching him in the stomach until the teachers broke it up. He didn’t even cry then, so for him to be crying now, he has to be feeling miserable.
I wipe his mouth with a tissue. “Change of plan,” I tell the Uber driver. “Hopedale ER, please.”
THREE
Finlay
I’m getting too old for this.
I realize that some people might not consider thirty-five old, but I swear, some days I might as well be waving a cane and yelling, “You kids get off my lawn!” Maybe it’s just that I’ve been doing this too long. Or maybe it’s just a Friday night in the ER.
Sure, Saturdays are usually worse. Nights of a full moon are worse. This seems like just another Friday night: busy with all kinds of stupid shit as well as serious emergencies, and hey, it’s what I’ve chosen to do with my life, after all.
Maybe it’s because I know there’s nobody waiting at home for me. That could be it. Lately, it seems like there’s just something in the water around here: all my doctor colleagues are obsessed with settling down. First Noah, who the nurses used to call the hot dad of the ER, started dating that cute radio tech, and they got married. Then Deena (she of the amazing bosom and the addictive toffee cookies) ran into her ex-boyfriend who is now an EMT, and they hot-footed it off to the altar. And then Maddox, who used to be good for a beer and a ballgame on nights we weren’t working, hooked up with Noah’s sister and now spends all his nights with her.
It’s enough to make me wonder why everybody but me is getting paired up. I mean, does the smell of “failed marriage” float off me like too much Axe?
I was married for two years, and I’ve been divorced for five years. You’d think I’d be used to it by now.
Look, they don’t call med school loans “the relationship ruiner” for nothing. My parents struggled to help me pay for college, and there was no way I was asking them to go further into debt for me. That meant student loans. Big ones. That I needed to pay off as soon as possible, if I didn’t want my credit score to be sitting at 400 for the rest of my life.
I always figured Becky and I were on the same page with our finances. She was already a branch assistant manager at the bank by the time we got married, so I was sure she’d understand my wanting to clear those loans before we did anything like buy a house, or have kids. I’d work, she’d work, we’d wipe out that big burden, and eventually we’d be free to start really living.
But not six months into it, she started complaining about my work schedule. She was lucky enough to have a 9-to-5 at the bank on weekdays, but emergency medicine doesn’t often give you time off for family holidays, or weekends. I was always working every shift I could manage, and when I was home I was sleeping. After a month or two of bitching about it, she quit complaining. I figured she’d finally understood the nagging financial pressure I was under.
Nope. She started going to the gym a lot, and she met a guy there. By the time I realized what was going on, it was too late. She wanted out.
So. Divorce.
It’s taken me every month of the five years without Becky, but I’ve paid off the loans. I take my vacations now. Sometimes I go out with friends: dinner, a beer after work, sometimes a movie. I’ve been out with a few girls, but there was always some point where I’d look at the girl across the restaurant table from me and think, I bet she’d tell me she was happy when she wasn’t, and whatever spark there was would just die.
Somewhere in the world is a girl who is loyal. Who would tell me flat-out she needs more from me, and trusts me to give it to her. Somewhere. I just haven’t met her yet.
So tonight, I snag five minutes in the break room to shove two of Deena’s toffee cookies into my mouth and wash them down with chocolate milk (what? I keep a half-gallon in the fridge in there). Seriously, those things are like legal crack. Maddox starts picking on me about the cookies, and finally I shut him up by telling him I’m going to ask Deena for her recipe.
On the way back to the central desk, I peek into the waiting room of the ER, just to see how bad it’s getting. It’s not bad yet. Not quite 9 p.m., so the Friday-night-drunks haven’t started piling in yet. It’s pretty full in there, though. Old ladies in walkers, little kids with snotty noses. A teenager with what might be a broken arm, based on the pained look on his face and the you-never-listen look on his mom’s.