The VA hospital was different than she expected—for one, no one saluted her when she came in. Where were all the handsome, wounded soldiers waiting for their Florence Nightingale?
“Well, shit!” she said. It was her favorite expression and it conveyed so much with only the slightest change of tone, the hand on a hip or a raised eyebrow—as in, “Well, shit, don’t you look good tonight?” That wasn't how she meant it now.
She sighed. What a way to spend her Tuesday afternoon. She flicked a piece of lint off her jacket with a flamingo pink fingernail and let her gum have another round before spitting it in the trash next to the weak coffee, white powder and dented Styrofoam cups.
She cleared her throat at the counter and tossed back her hair without meaning to—it was another favorite habit that had become as inseparable as “well, shit.” Besides, if the handsome, wounded soldiers came in, she had been told more than once down in Reno that she had a very pretty throat.
“I’m here to volunteer,” she said.
The woman at the counter was black and maybe twice her age—calm and unimpressed by her pink fingernails.
“You’re gonna hafta fill out these forms—and put some gloves on those,” she said.
Bernice stopped and looked at her. “Gloves? For what?”
“Bedpans,” said the receptionist. “We need a whole lot of bedpans changed.”
Bernice took the clipboard and the blue gloves that did not match her its-almost-Easter outfit at all (pinks and lavenders—blue just threw the whole thing off).
She rolled up her sleeves and followed the orderly down the hall and spent the rest of the day “elbow deep in asses” as she planned to tell Iris, who was the one who put the insane idea into her head to come here in the first place.
It was the second to last room and she was ready for the day to be done. Her hair clung in wisps to her forehead but she didn’t dare use her hands for anything until she found a bucket of bleach to soak them in.
“Well aren’t you a regular Florence Nightingale?” said a voice, handsome before she even looked up.
Her heart seized, one eyebrow raised, a blue-gloved hand alighted on her breast and she breathed, “Well, shit.”
February, 2008.
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