Chapter 1

“Are you sure that you didn’t leave anything? Did you check the shelf in the closet? Under the bed? I noticed how you weren’t really cleaning under there.”

My tenant—former tenant—turned and stared at me. “Why were you looking under my bed? You shouldn’t have been in my room!”

“It’s my house,” I reminded her. “If I suspect problems, it’s my responsibility to check them out.”

“What kind of problem would have been under my bed?” Liv asked. Her voice got loud on the last words, and her fiancé reached down and put his hand on her shoulder. He’d carried everything out, every single one of her bags, in one trip. Now everything was loaded into his SUV and they were ready to go.

She nodded a little and sighed. “It doesn’t matter. Yes, I got all of my stuff. Nicola, are you going to be ok? I’m kind of worried about leaving you like this.”

“I’m fine,” I responded. I had made a big mistake when I’d let her in on the situation with the house. I had only told her because I was afraid that I’d have to move, which would have meant that Liv would have been out, too. Except she had decided to go off with her fiancé anyway, so I should have kept my mouth shut about being in default.

She looked back at the big guy and they seemed to have a silent conversation before she turned to me again. “Hunt and I were serious about the loan,” she said. “What do you think? Will you accept it?”

“I don’t need a loan,” I answered. “I figured it all out. I’m fine now.”

She clearly didn’t believe me, which she shouldn’t have. It was a lie and I was still in huge trouble.

“Liv,” her fiancé said.

“Ok,” she agreed, but she still hesitated instead of leaving. “Will you talk to your family about this? They’d want to help, too. Addie would be good,” she said. Addie was one of the sisters that I still spoke to, and I bet that Liv was aware of that. She had grown up around the corner from me and my six siblings and we’d all known each other since we were little. She had always been privy to just about everything that happened in my family, but she hadn’t known about my financial issues and she didn’t know about anything else. None of them did.

“I would appreciate if you didn’t speak to them about this,” I said, and she looked upset, but she nodded again. The two kids who lived across the street came out of their house to see what we were doing, and she waved at them. They waved back and stood in their yard, watching.

“Liv,” the fiancé repeated, and I wondered if he could say anything else. Maybe he grunted, too.

“We really hope you’ll come to the wedding,” she said, and smiled just like she did whenever she mentioned anything that involved the giant man hovering behind her. “You’ll have fun.”

“I’ll let you know. Goodbye,” I told them, and closed the front door. I needed to get out of here immediately because I needed to get to work at Midtown General Medical Center, but I waited until the SUV was gone. They were driving off to some apartment he’d just bought in addition to the house he owned up north. Apparently, her fiancé had money to spare and nothing better to do than to waste it on excess real estate. Some people just liked to show off, I guessed. When there was no longer any sign of them, I grabbed my stuff, and I purposefully didn’t look at myself in the mirror as I also left my house.

The shift at MGMC was as long as ever, twelve hours of getting run off my feet, but I liked the frenetic pace. It kept me from thinking about other things, like what was I going to do without the money coming in from Liv, my former housemate. How was I going to pay my utility bills? Yes, winter was nearing its end and the weather was improving, but I still needed heat. I still needed water, I still needed lights, at least until the house wasn’t mine anymore.

“Nurse?” a woman called as I walked by. “Are you my nurse?”

I recognized her immediately. “Hello, Sylvia. I just saw you last week in the Detroit Saint Raphael emergency room. How many times have you come into Midtown General?”

“No, I’ve never been here before,” she assured me. “I have a neck injury and I’m in pain. Can I get anything for it? I’m at a nine or ten, it’s real bad. My medication got stolen and I’ve tried everything over the counter. Could you give me an IV? Can you push it fast? It’s real bad,” she repeated.

“I’ll check with your doctor,” I said, keeping my voice even, but the answer was no. Our standard of care did not include providing narcotics to drug seekers, women like Sylvia who had been here so many times that every employee knew her name. It wouldn’t help her to aid and abet her addiction, no matter how many times she asked us for it. Which was going to be a lot.

“Nurse?Nurse!”

I moved on and dealt with other patients, other problems, other injuries and illnesses. I got into a groove of working that freed me from worrying. As soon as I was walking toward the doors to go home, though, the cold wind blowing in reminded me of the problem with the heat in my house. Like, the problem of how I was going to keep it on.

Hospital staff had to park in a lot all the way out in the suburbs, practically, and there was supposed to be a shuttle bus for us but the driver was always off somewhere looking at his phone. My thought was that he had an extensive porn collection or he was gambling, but either way, he was usually occupied with that instead of his job of picking us up and taking us to our cars. Most of the people who were also coming off their shifts milled around the exit, waiting, yawning, and chatting a little, but I wanted to get out of here. I zipped up my coat and strode past the other nurses, the techs, assistants, and various employees. I kept my head down and went as fast as I could, squinting against the sun and the wind that whipped over the hoods of visitor vehicles in their lot and the doctors’ cars in their lot, which was a lot closer to the building than where the rest of the hospital personnel had to park.

As I finally approached my own car, I heard my name. “Nicola?”

I looked around and saw a man coming towards me. “Are you Nicola?” he called.

Whatever he wanted, I didn’t need to know and I wasn’t going to participate in it. “Nope,” I answered, and kept right on walking.

“Aren’t you Nicola? The nurse?”

“No, I’m not Nurse Nicola. Leave me alone.”

“You helped me. It was more than a year ago, more like eighteen months. I got pushed out of a car in front of Detroit Saint Raphael Hospital and you were the nurse I saw there.”

I stopped then and held up my hand to shield my eyes from the sun so I could get a better look at him. “What did you say?”

“My name is Jude Bowers.” He took another couple of steps that brought him into focus. I saw a tall guy, on the thin side. His hair was cut really, really short, a buzz that was only a dark shadow on his head. It made his high cheekbones stand out a lot because he seemed too thin. I could see his brown eyes as he got even closer and I remembered how they’d looked when I’d met him before. Just like that night all those months ago, they were sad. It had been a long time and he’d cleaned up a lot—he’d shaved, trimmed his hair, and definitely bathed, but his eyes were the same.

“You probably have a lot of patients,” he commented. “You probably don’t remember. I was very, very drunk, and I died in the emergency room. They brought me back.”

“Are you serving me papers or something?”

That question seemed to confuse him. “What? No—”

“I wasn’t the one who saved you,” I interrupted. “That wasn’t me because I had already left.”

“I remember that,” he said. “I remember how you left.”

And then he looked down at my shoes as if he really did, but I didn’t think so. He’d died that night, and the last thing that would have been on his mind was where his vomit had landed.

“What do you want?” I asked. I crossed my arms over my chest, acting as if I didn’t care about him and his presence, but I was also looking around the lot for escape routes. I was ready to run and scream if he tried anything. The shuttle bus couldn’t have been that far away and it was full of people who didn’t like me but who would have intervened if I were getting attacked, because it wasn’t as if they were bad or anything. Just really annoying.

“Are you Nicola? You are, aren’t you?”

I shrugged.

“You stayed and talked to me that night at Detroit Saint Raphael. It was my rock bottom, and I remember you telling me that things could get better.”

I remembered that too, but I shrugged again.

“They have,” he continued. “That was the last time I drank. I’ve been clean for eighteen months.”

He seemed to be waiting for something, probably more than a shrug. “Great,” I said. “Congratulations.”

“Do you remember me?”

“Yes,” I said reluctantly. “I’m glad to see that you’re doing well.” And it was true, I actually did feel that way.

He nodded. “I really am.”

“And I’m really glad.” We were done here, right? I sure was, so I walked away.

“Wait!” he said, and I slowed down slightly as he caught up. “I also wanted to say thank you for your help that night. You made a difference for me, and I truly appreciate it.”

“Great,” I said again, but now that I didn’t think I was imminent danger of a lawsuit or a physical attack, my mind was working better. “How exactly did you find me? This is a different hospital. How did you know I’d be here?”

“I went to Detroit Saint Raphael first to ask about you.”

I jerked to a stop. “And they told you where I was? That’s totally inappropriate. Who did it?” I asked angrily. “Was it a nurse named Cleo? I’m going to report her to HR.” She’d been all over me about working at both hospitals, saying that I was compromising care because I was obviously so tired, how no one was getting my best. I clenched my trembling hands—trembling in anger, not exhaustion.

He seemed startled. “No, it wasn’t an employee there. I asked at the desk but they wouldn’t say anything about you. It was another guy in the waiting room, a patient. He overheard me talking about the nurse with red hair and he said that he also sees you at Midtown General. I guess he must have bad health problems so he goes to different hospitals a lot.”

There were many people who frequented the emergency departments, from those who used them as a primary care physicians to those like Sylvia, the drug seeker who’d had a fit when we wouldn’t accommodate her addiction. Too bad my hair had made me memorable to them.

“I came here last night but it was so busy, and the woman at the security station inside said it would be better to wait until your shift was over,” he continued. “A bus driver was hanging out with her and he volunteered that almost everyone in the emergency room had a twelve hour shift that started at seven PM, so I went home and came back this morning.”

He went home, which meant he seemed to have a place to live. “Ok, I get it,” I said. “No reason to go to human resources except to let them know that the shuttle bus driver is sharing employee information.” Great that he had pulled himself away from placing bets or staring at boobs on his phone for that. “Goodbye.” I headed off again.

“Wait,” he said again, but I didn’t pause my movement so he kept walking along with me. “I wondered if I could buy you a cup of coffee, or breakfast.”

“Is this a thing about making amends? You don’t have to,” I told him. “I don’t need you to say sorry for getting sick all over me and ruining my new shoes.”

“Oh, damn. I was hoping that I wasn’t remembering that right.”

“Stuff happens in the ER. I was only doing my job and I don’t care.”

“I do, and I’m sorry.”

I did stop, because now we were at my car. “The vomit doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m sure that you have other people waiting for your apologies and their issues must be a lot more important than mine. You can move on and do your steps with them. Ok? Bye.”

“Ok,” he said. “I won’t bother you anymore. But thank you. Thank you very much.”

“You’re welcome,” I told him, but then hesitated. “If you want to thank people who made a meaningful difference for you, go find the doctor who shocked you and the nurse who was doing CPR. I won’t give you their names because unlike others, I understand confidentiality.”

“I don’t think that someone telling me that employees here work twelve-hour shifts was breaking confidentiality,” he said. “And I saw that doctor and nurse yesterday at the other hospital, and I did thank them. I thanked a lot of people working there and I wanted to say it to you, too, because I’m alive due to all of your care.”

“I was only doing my job,” I repeated. “I’m sure everyone was glad to see you up and healthy.” I looked at him, assessing his skin. He was a little pale but I didn’t see the yellow of jaundice or any other abnormal coloring. No visible lesions or bruising.

“I’m much better. I think it helped that I used to be a pretty healthy person,” he said. “I ate right and I always exercised. Before.”

He meant, “Before I got pushed out of a car,” because that definitely hadn’t been a healthy moment. “You still spent a long time in the ICU,” I remarked.

“I did,” he agreed. “When I got out, I wasn’t doing great, either. I ended up couch surfing for a while before I pulled it together. But I wasn’t drinking,” he added. “I haven’t, not since that night when I ruined your shoes.”

“So you said.”

He tilted his head as he looked at me. “You don’t believe that?”

“It’s not really my business, is it? I only treated you for a few hours on one night, a year and a half ago. The rest of your life is up to you and I won’t see you again unless you end up back in the emergency department. I hope you don’t.”

“I hope I don’t either.” He paused. “Are you sure I can’t buy you a cup of coffee? It seems like the least I could do.”

“I get paid to take care of patients. You don’t owe me anything.” I watched the shuttle bus slowly approach, ready to disgorge my colleagues who would then create a minor traffic problem at the exit of the lot that I wanted to avoid. “Ok? You’re all done?”

“I…yep.I am.”

“Great,” I repeated for the tenth or so time. “Bye.” I opened my car door and watched through the windshield as he walked off, back toward the visitors’ lot. I happened to be driving that way towards the exit and as I neared where he was getting into his own car, I took my foot off the accelerator. I wasn’t going fast anyway, because although many employees felt that it was ok to race through here like it was the Brickyard in Indianapolis, I did not. They could tailgate me as much as they wanted and I didn’t care at all because I was going to maintain the appropriate speed no matter how anyone else acted.

But there was no one behind me yet as my car slowed and then I pressed down on the brake and stopped. I rolled down the window.

“I’ll go get coffee,” I said, and Jude Bowers looked up.

“I’m glad,” he answered, and he smiled. He had a very warm, friendly smile that included all his teeth. He hadn’t lost any due to his addiction, a lucky thing for him. “Want to follow me?”

Not really, because I didn’t like following people. I was the oldest in my family of seven kids and I was getting up there in terms of seniority at my jobs. Those things meant I was a leader. I had been the same way in school, as the head cheerleader, as the president of the student government, as our class representative to the administration in college.

But for now, I followed him. He drove to a diner downtown that I’d never eaten at. To be fair, I didn’t get out very much, so a lot was going to be new to me. I watched him park and then, very quickly, I checked myself in the mirror. It was worse than the last time I’d looked, so I took a moment to shuffle through the belongings in my purse to hunt for a tube of lip gloss. Nope, didn’t have one.

“Nicola?” He knocked on my window from the sidewalk, and I got out of the car and we walked toward the restaurant. “They have good pancakes,” he was saying as we went inside but I noticed that it wasn’t too busy this morning, which didn’t speak well for their food. Also, the floor wasn’t as clean as it could have been so I checked the silverware pretty carefully when we sat at a booth, wondering how hot the water in their dishwashers got. A lot of restaurants weren’t as sanitary as the Detroit Health Department required.

I ordered ice water while he got coffee and then we both quietly looked at the menu. I assumed that we would be splitting the check for this meal, which meant that I chose frugally.

“A half stack,” I requested when the waitress returned. “No butter, not on the side, not on the plate. Also, I need a new glass of water. There are fingerprints on this one.”

“That’s all you want, after working all night?” Jude asked me, but when I didn’t answer, he went ahead and ordered a lot of breakfast for himself. I noticed that he did get a side of fruit, but it was strawberries and those were always very problematic due to the overuse of pesticides. I started to share that but then remembered how, earlier in the week, one of my coworkers had gotten very, very angry when I’d made the same comment about the blueberries she was snacking on.

At least he was eating. You didn’t need a medical background to see that he was too thin, and the shirt he was wearing looked a size too big for him in the torso. Not the sleeves, though, and it was obviously old, the flannel pilling and the collar slightly frayed. I concluded that it had belonged to him in his life before. He’d worn it when he’d had a normal existence but then he’d turned into a drunk and ruined everything for himself.

“So, what have you been doing for the past eighteen months?” he asked me.

“You didn’t know what I was doing before then, either,” I pointed out, and we were silent again. The waitress gave me a new glass of water and also a sassy look, and she reminded me a lot of my little sister Brenna. We didn’t talk anymore, but that girl had always dished out the attitude.

“I don’t want to belabor this, but you really made an impression on me,” he said.

“Really? Great,” I said as I checked the new glass. It was cleaner, but not by much. I polished it with a paper napkin.

“When you told me that I could have another chance at happiness, I believed you. I’d spent a long time thinking that I might as well…” He didn’t finish, but I understood him to mean that he didn’t care if he lived or not. Now that he was speaking clearly, not slurring through alcohol, I thought that he had a nice voice. It was kind of musical. He was also, as I’d suspected, not a bad-looking guy. Yes, he needed to put on weight, but he wasn’t bad. I imagined how I would have been if I’d had the time to do my hair and to dress in something other than scrubs. Not that it mattered, but I could have looked better, too.

“Anyway, we don’t need to sit here and rehash my addiction,” he told me. “I spend enough time thinking about it.”

“Then why did you want me to come have breakfast?”

“It wasn’t to get you to help me more,” he said. “I just…I remembered you so much. I remembered you being funny, and I thought that I remembered throwing up on you. I’m really sorry about that. I owe you new shoes.”

“No, they cleaned up fine. I was funny?”

“I think you were saying that a woman would need to have low standards to be with me,” Jude answered. “Yeah, it was funny.”

I’d never thought of myself that way. I’d heard other words applied to me, but not that one. “I didn’t mean to be,” I admitted. “I was only being honest.” My sister Sophie said that I used honesty as an opportunity to be rude, which was one of the reasons that the two of us weren’t speaking anymore. “I didn’t mean to be rude, either,” I told him.

But he smiled again. “I think it’s funny, and also true. A woman would need very low standards to be with a guy who lives in a halfway house.”

“You don’t have anywhere else to go?”

“I burned a lot of bridges,” he said, which was true about all of these people. Eventually, the families got tired of them and their problems, or they didn’t have the resources to deal with them anymore. “I’m looking for another place that I can afford as I try to get my business restarted.”

“What was your business?”

“I made furniture. Like this,” he said, and took out his phone. It was an old one with a very cracked screen, but I could see the images as he flicked though them. He’d made all kinds of wood stuff, tables and chairs and cabinets, some different styles but mostly very plain. Plain, but I thought they were elegant, not plain like a kid threw them together. It seemed like he’d known what he was doing.

“I used to have my own shop but I sold off all my equipment and lost the lease on the building. I’m working for a guy now who’s an ex-con and likes to give people second chances. Losers like me,” he said.

“You’re lucky you get to do it again.”

“I know. I’m also doing deliveries when I’m not there, but it’s hard to save enough to rent someplace.”

I nodded. Yes, it was hard to save. “No family?” I confirmed, and he shook his head.

“I’m an only child and my parents passed away when I was twenty. I have some distant relatives, but no one who would want to help. Not that they have any obligation to me, and not that I would ask them to step in,” he added. “I’ll keep figuring things out on my own. I’m getting there.”

I sipped my water. I would have asked for lemon, but it was a sure thing that restaurants didn’t wash citrus before they cut it up for drinks. I remembered how I’d told my sister Juliet that on her twenty-first birthday when we’d all gone out, and she’d said that the alcohol in her glass would kill any germs.

“That’s not true, and think about the dirt,” I’d warned, but she’d gotten a twist anyway. Juliet was ok, though. We texted sometimes and I also heard from my sister Addie. The rest of them—Sophie, Patrick, Brenna, and Grace, were mostly out of my life, except at the required holiday gatherings. That was fine with me, and I didn’t miss them.

Jude was asking me about that very subject. “Are you close with your family?”

“More or less,” I said. “Do you have your plan written out? If not, you should. When you see it in black and white, you’re more likely to follow it. I have paper.” I had that but not lip gloss in my bag, because I almost always carried a journal with me. “Here.” I ripped out a few pages and slid them over the table along with a pen that was one of my personal favorites.

“You want me to write out a plan for my life? Right now?”

“Do you already have one?” I asked, but at that moment the waitress arrived with a plate for me and a lot more for the other side of the booth. While we ate, he showed me a little journal that he also carried, but his was full of sketches of things. He didn’t have issues making conversation, and we talked about the food, about the restaurant, and about living in the city, and it wasn’t a bad way to spend some time.

I was done with my meal a lot sooner than he was, due to having one plate versus many. While he finished, I took the torn pages and pen and started to outline. “I’ve put together these plans for all of my siblings,” I said off-handedly as I wrote. “Goals, that’s the first section. What are yours?”

“Not to drink. How many siblings do you have?”

“I’m the oldest of seven.”

“Seven kids.” He whistled, and I looked up quickly. I remembered him doing that in the emergency department, whistling at me when I’d walked away. It was a wolf whistle, like he’d thought I was…holy Mary, I was still thinking about that? He’d been out of his mind, and then a few minutes later, had nearly died. He had not been in the position to judge female beauty, and I didn’t care what he thought about my looks, anyway.

“What are their names?” he asked, so l listed us in order: me, Sophie, Addie, Patrick and Juliet who were twins, Brenna, and Grace. My brother had moved to California and our youngest sister Grace still lived at home with our parents. The rest of us were on our own around the Detroit area, in the suburbs and the city.

“Was your mom like—”

“Nothing like any character in a movie about big families, nothing like any show that you’ve seen or any book you’ve read. Our lives were chaotic and our house was a mess,” I said, to head off the inevitable questions that came when someone heard about our oversized family. “We had four bedrooms, and my parents took one and my brother had another. The six girls spilt the other two. We also shared one bathroom, and I’ll leave it to you to imagine how that went.”

“I don’t think I can imagine, but I always wanted siblings, myself,” he said.

“I love them all, even my parents, but they’re also very annoying.” I pointed to the paper. “I wrote your top goal about staying off booze. What else? You said you want to restart your business, right? I’ll put that down. What about interpersonal?”

“You mean women?”

I pushed back a lock of hair that had straggled out of my clip. “I mean, do you want to get married? How about kids? Where do you want to live?”

“I just need to get through every day,” Jude answered. “And you were right about the kind of woman who would want me.”

I remembered what I’d told him all those months ago, and the words were still true. “Low standards, poor self-esteem, plenty of problems of her own,” I said, nodding. “Not really someone you’d want to marry.”

He laughed. “I don’t think a woman with all those issues would want me, either. I’m no prize.”

“You’re a lot better off than you were when I first saw you,” I pointed out. I studied his face and he looked right back at me. “I think you’re pretty handsome, but you’re too skinny and that’s a turnoff. We should write ‘exercise and working out’ as one of your goals.” I did. “Also, you should grow your hair.”

“Well, the nasty-ass reason I have my hair buzzed off is because there was a lice outbreak at the halfway house. I had it bad.”

“I hate lice,” I said. “I hate human parasites in general, but we see a lot of them.”

“You’re very matter-of-fact.”

“Why would I be anything else?” I asked. “Should I scream and squeal? My sister Brenna is like that, very dramatic. She would have a fit if she saw a louse.”

“I will admit that I wasn’t very happy to see them, either. What are your other sisters like?”

I told him a little about them as I worked on his plan. Sophie was the next oldest, after me, and she had ruined her life. I described how she lived like a hermit, and then I explained how Addie had a terrible boyfriend and was fooling herself that he was a normal person. Patrick was an idiot in general, Juliet was wasting her money, Brenna was a diva, Grace was wishy-washy and needed to stand on her own two feet.

“They have a lot of problems,” he commented.

“They’re fine. Ok, here’s what I came up with.” I pushed the papers back across to him. “You didn’t give me much information to go on, but you can start with that.”

He held up the pages to read. “You just wrote all this?” He flipped a paper over. “There’s a fitness and nutrition plan?”

“It’s very general. Here’s my share for breakfast,” I said, and put some money on the table top. “It includes a gratuity. I don’t ever tip excessively and especially not this morning since the second glass she brought wasn’t clean, either.”

“Your two pancakes are on me,” he answered and tried to give it back, but I already knew that he needed to save since he was living in lice-infested squalor. At least my house was clean.

“I hope you can follow the life plan,” I said. “I hope for the best for you.” I really did, which surprised me.

“Will you take your money—” He acquiesced when I shook my head sharply. “Ok. Thanks for having breakfast with me. Thank you for everything.”

“You’re welcome.” I stood there next to the table before I recalled that I needed to get my butt in gear. I had another shift this afternoon and things to do besides burning daylight in a diner. “Bye.”

“Bye, Nicola.”

I liked how he said my name. I thought about it as I went north on Woodward Avenue towards my home, which was lice-free. As matter-of-fact as I might have been about parasites, I still didn’t want them where I lived. I would change, sleep some, clean, get ready for my next job, and then go on with the rest of my life.

I would probably think more about Jude Bowers. In fact, I was thinking about him right now.