master keys hooked to the loop of his work pants. Twenty-seven keys for twenty-seven office /closet /cabinet /washroom doors, plus the door to the south end fire escape. They jangled when he mopped, pushed the broom, sat down, stood up. Every small clanging reminding him of the series of tasks to which he’d committed. He got two smoke breaks and a lunch break, during which he stayed out of the hospital cafeteria and opted instead for the nearby diner where he could eat for two dollars and the ashtrays were shaped, for no particular reason, like flounder.
It was as ordinary a job as Ronny had ever had. He shuffled down the bleak hallway, counting squares of tile, dustpan in tow; shuffled back. It was routine. It was solitary. Not many patients on the floor. Every few days a stretcher would get wheeled through, empty, a nurse headed to the X-ray lab one floor down. A few times a visitor had gotten lost on the way to a patient’s room, and Ronny had to redirect them to the elevators, but there wasn’t much need, otherwise, for anyone to talk to him, or for him to ever speak.
Generic hour after generic hour, he wore the day out in increments of light physical labor, and though it was boring, at least he was moving around and not sitting there staring at blocks of cement anymore. And what more was it meant to be, really, besides what it was: a day job, a way to spend the hours he’d have to get through anyhow. Because if he wasn’t at the hospital he’d have to be somewhere else. No way was he going to stay at home with his dad there, milling around in his old suits, lining up plastic army men on the mantle, shooting finger guns at them from across the room. Forget it. For now he might as well tab the scale and properly dispose of broken iodine vials.
When he went down for his break, he went out the parking deck side and crossed the lot to the benches that bordered a kind of fake, hospital-land park. He smoked and thought about her. The antique situation of her herringbone knee socks, the sweatshirt with the neck cut out that slipped, showing off part of her shoulder when she moved. Not something Ronny would ever notice but everything about Vivian was distinctive in a quiet, offhand way. Probably lots of the time she could be a wallflower, plain as any anonymous person standing shyly in a crowded room, with her monochromatic, slightly ill-fitting clothes; her peach Chapsticked lips. She looked like she lived in a different universe than the girls he knew and had grown used to in all their decorations: decaled palm tree and checkerboard nails and dangling earrings stacked at varying lengths up and down their perfect ears. Definitely sexy, he wouldn’t deny it, but Vivian’s unadorned loveliness was stranger. Out of place. He found himself getting distracted by thoughts of her throughout the day, as he polished the floor, inventoried the Doctor’s scales, and took the stairs two at a time down to the basement. At least it kept him from tallying up all the things he might want to set on fire.
Vivian Merritt Foster drowned in Good Hope Lake. During the heat wave, late afternoon, solo captaining the boat down to the basin where the old prison barracks were, now mostly rotted to shacks. Around here, people joyride boats, leave the cars alone. Mostly ends okay but the storm broke out, no warning, and this boat wasn’t a boat with a proper cabin but a skiff you shove right out of on rough waters, which came, rolling waves that pounded the docks—too far off—and the vessel. The rain pounded the splintering boat and the dreggy lake and went on and on and the lightning diagrammed the smokestacks through the dark, slashed the treetops. Vivian couldn’t swim. She is survived by one known brother, Seth Everett Foster, most recently of California. She appears to have struggled to pen a letter to dry land in her last minutes, though no evidence thereof remains.
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