Callan Wink - Dog Run Moon

She went to school. For three semesters, she’d been a college girl. She worried about finals. She worked part-time at the Western Café serving breakfast. She lived in the dorms. Once she’d had sex with a boy she’d met only that night and never saw much again after. She still marveled about this sometimes; not the act itself, just her ability to perform it. It seemed like something someone else had done.

She had the idea that she might want to be a nurse. It wasn’t something she’d put a lot of thought into, but she had a vague idea that nurses were generally optimistic and competent and rarely lacked for employment opportunities. That is what she told people when they asked her what she was studying. “I’m pursuing my nursing degree,” she’d say, liking the way it sounded, as if the degree were something she had to chase down. She pictured the diploma — the piece of paper itself, the little embossed seal and looping signature of the dean — wind-borne, fluttering out across the empty field behind her house. Herself in pursuit.

Three days a week she opened the café at six in the morning. The early crowd was mostly old men who wore jeans and pearl-snap shirts and Stetsons that they would put beside them on the bar top when they ate. These were men whose wives had finally gone on to rest after a lifetime of ranch work and whose children hadn’t yet gotten up the courage to suggest a retirement home.

She liked the job well enough. She poured endless cups of coffee and laughed and rolled her eyes when one of the old buzzards made a feeble pass at her.

And then, a regular she knew by first name only, Edward, had a stroke in the bathroom and she simultaneously learned two things. First, that she wouldn’t be able to continue working at the Western and second, that she might not have what it took to be a nurse.

The realities of the old men’s prostates coupled with severe coffee consumption meant that the single-stall restroom at the Western was in near-constant use every morning. When a line four-deep had formed at the closed door, and the occupant wasn’t responding to knocks, she was forced to do something. Still holding her coffee pot, she rapped sharply on the door and there was silence. Everyone in the restaurant was watching now, and she didn’t know what to do. She cleared her throat.

“I’m going to come in, Edward,” she said, surprised to hear her own voice. It was her do-you-want-another-refill voice. There was no reply and she handed the coffee pot to the nearest man and put her shoulder to the thin door. It splintered at the lock, too easily, and she stumbled in under her own force and almost landed in Edward’s lap. He was slumped on the toilet, pants around his ankles, his legs spread, with a long line of spittle trailing out from his crooked lips. She remembered clearly that his eyes were open and that they watched her, dully. He was still alive, but he had cow eyes.

She tried to stick it out for a while longer but no matter what was cooking on the hot line, the Western smelled like the bathroom had smelled that day — the rankness of Edward’s loosened bowels spiked with the chemical odor of the air freshener. It made her nauseous. What troubled her more, though, was what this incident seemed to reveal about her own lack of backbone. A nurse would have taken control, would have felt an innate sense of compassion and made the best out of a horrible situation. Lauren had, as it turned out, a weak stomach. She’d backed out of the room with her hands over her mouth, Edward’s bovine glare following her every move. The old men had to do everything. She’d even been unable to make her fingers work to dial for the ambulance.

At school, she felt like an impostor. She knew that it would only get worse. She would have to attend to people in pain. Wipe excrement from people’s bodies. Go home and wash blood and worse from her scrubs. It all seemed too much. She looked for signs among her classmates. Did anyone else sitting on either side of her in the lecture hall have this inner recoiling when confronted with the sight and smells of humanity most basic? If they did, she saw no sign. These women seemed staunch and solid. The type who could look unblinking into fevered faces, smooth the brows of children with incurable ailments, not panic when confronted with the unnatural sight of limbs mangled in a car accident. Her classmates were people who could be unperturbed by ill health. She had been tested and found wanting. Simple as that.

She stopped attending classes. She moved out of the dorms and back in with her mother until she could find her own place. She got a job.

3.

By age thirty-two, Lauren had been sole caretaker for her mother for three years. Her mother had given birth to her when she was forty-one years old. An accident, with a man she had no intentions of marrying. She’d been divorced once already, and said that she wanted no part of that song and dance. “I met him at the rodeo on Fourth of July and we watched the fireworks,” she said.

“I think he was maybe twenty-two years old. I mean, come on. We had fun for the weekend, and he left when the rodeo pulled out. Don’t think of him as your daddy. Think of him as a sperm donor working pro bono. He was good-looking and smart, for a cowboy.”

Lauren always had the vague idea that at some point she would track down her father, just to meet him. Maybe an awkward conversation over coffee so she could have a face to attach to the word, and then that would be that. She didn’t want a relationship with the guy, but it did seem that she almost owed him the knowledge of her existence. In her time at college, Lauren had taken a biology course where the professor had tried to show them that the one constant for life in the universe, the purpose of life, if you will, was procreation. When it came right down to it, the goal of life in nature is simply to create more life. This had always stuck with her and she didn’t like the idea that maybe the sperm-supplying half of her biological makeup might be a broken-down old cowboy who didn’t know that he had a daughter to show for his years on earth.

When Lauren was young, her mother always maintained that she didn’t know how to get in touch with him. But Lauren was pretty sure she could have if she’d wanted to. She was just protecting her from disappointment. Lauren figured that at some point she and her mother would get a little drunk on wine and the whole thing would come out, and she’d get his name and last known address and at some point would track him down for that awkward conversation over coffee. As it turned out, her mother, entering her late sixties, began to experience periods of slippage. She’d stop in mid-conversation and hold her finger to her nose the way she always did when she was thinking hard. “Now,” she’d say. “What? What were we talking about just then? Jesus, I must be tired.”

A year later, she’d been in two car accidents and had her license taken away. A year after that, Lauren found herself moving back home once more. This time to take care of her mother, who, the doctors said, in another year’s time might not remember how to feed herself.

This was a typical dinnertime conversation:

“What is this, chicken? I don’t want chicken.”

“You love chicken, Mom.”

“I don’t like it. Do we have any cookies? I’d like a peanut butter cookie.”

“You can’t have a cookie for dinner.”

“And who hired you to tell me what to do? Did Lauren put you up to this?”

“Mom.”

“Don’t call me Mom.”

“Eat your chicken.”

“Am I a prisoner in my own home? Lauren wouldn’t be happy if she knew the way you treated me.”

“Mom. I am Lauren. Eat your chicken. I cut it up for you.”