The morning started like always, with Nurse Nora rapping on my door, and me hollering at Carl to get his sorry ass out of bed so we didn’t miss breakfast. And then there was Nora again, with her coffee breath and her hum of gospel songs, helping me stand and pulling up my trousers and shushing me and winking at me and telling me to let sleeping dogs lie, and Why can’t you be nicer, Mr. Duffy, and me telling her if I were both nice and handsome, people wouldn’t want to be friends with me.
And then, sure as the sunrise, Nora smiled despite herself, because I have that effect on people, and said, “Who went and told you that you’re handsome?”
“A man simply knows these things,” I said, sliding my shoes on, using her shoulder as leverage. “Hey, Carl, did you hear Nora calling you a dog?”
“I heard her call you ugly.” Carl’s walker squeaked on the green linoleum floor as he made his way around his bed, smoothing the wrinkles out of the covers. “She’s right too. I’ve said before that I can’t tell the difference between you and Margaret Thatcher, but I think you take it as a compliment.”
“I do,” I said. “Old Maggie had bigger balls than me.”
“Who doesn’t?” Carl said, snickering at his own little joke.
Oh, how I loved our daily spar. There was no better way to sharpen the knives and start the day. “Those are fighting words, sir. If the lady of the house wasn’t here, I’d set you straight.”
“Boys,” Nora reprimanded, or rather, as I called her, my Nora—my beautiful honey-skinned, big-breasted, long-nailed, hard-nosed Nora. She was a songbird built like a spark plug, like any good nurse should be.
She said, “The scrambled eggs go cold fast, and I know it’s gonna take you a good ten minutes to get down that hall—”
“We move faster than that,” I said.
“Mm-hmm. Not if you squeeze in your social hour on the way.” She ran a hand over my cowlick and floated over to Carl to dust off his shoulders, where he kept a never-ending collection of dandruff.
“You are simply the best, Nora,” he said, chin tucked so she didn’t miss a spot. “Do you want to take another one of my books? Or maybe some saltines? I saved them from yesterday.”
“What’ve I been telling you, Mr. Carl? If you keep on giving things away, you’re gonna go broke.” She knelt to Velcro his shoes, then wiped her hands on her pants and stood. “Listen now. I’ll be seeing you boys down there. I’m gonna help Mrs. Zimmerman bathe this morning.”
Carl let out a low catcalling whistle while I pretended to gag.
“You’re awful,” Nora said to me on her way out, which was true.
I turned to Carl and regarded him, with his spindly legs and his cardigan hanging on him like he was a little kid who had borrowed the sweater from his old man. “Why on earth are you whistling? You have something going with Mrs. Zimmerman I don’t know about?”
Carl fidgeted some, then fixed his watery eyes on me. They were set deep, no lashes; he always looked half-surprised.
“Well?” I said.
“Of course not, and you shouldn’t make fun of her like that.”
I waved off the suggestion and set about closing all the half-open dresser drawers. In the meantime, I could feel Carl’s gaze boring into my back. He was trying to force his sense of decorum onto me, because he knew my tasteless impersonation of Mrs. Zimmerman was brewing. He never did like when I pretended to have a bout of dementia, which required me to holler obscenities in my falsetto while following him around like he was my long-lost love.
After slamming the last drawer shut, I turned to find Carl’s face pinched up in worry. Like he thought I might eternally doom myself if I didn’t behave.
“Relax already,” I said. “I won’t clown around today.”
“Thank you.”
“But perhaps you shouldn’t have started it with your whistling.”
“You’re right,” he said. “No more jokes at her expense.”