“How did he know?” she whispered.
“He wouldn’t say.”
She blew out the candle. Then she put her forehead down on her steering wheel for a few seconds before she drove off to work.
I asked the boy once, straight out.
It was October, cold and still dark, with frost on the window ledge. He handed me a five and four quarters.
“Do you know her?” I said. “The nurse?”
He looked at the money in my hand instead of at me.
“Not really,” he said.
Then he drove away.
That “not really” stuck in me like a fishbone. It wasn’t “no,” and it wasn’t “yes.” It was the answer of a kid carrying something too heavy to set down in front of a stranger.
My manager, Kurt Gagnon, hated it.
Kurt was thirty-four, the owner’s nephew, and he ran the Mug & Muffin like it was a Fortune 500 company. He had a clipboard and a stopwatch app on his phone, and he timed every car at the window. The franchise office in Portland measured “average service time,” and Kurt wanted a bonus.
“He’s holding up the line every morning,” Kurt said, standing behind me with his arms crossed. “Waiting across the street like some kind of stalker. If he does it again, I’m calling the school.”
“He’s buying a nurse a coffee, Kurt.”
“He’s weird. Kids that age don’t do that for nothing.” He tapped his clipboard. “If he’s parked over there tomorrow, I’m calling the cops.”
One morning, Kurt leaned right over my shoulder at the window and said it to the nurse herself.
“Lady, that kid’s a creep,” he told her. “He’s probably casing your car. Figuring out your schedule. You should report him.”
The nurse looked at him for a long moment.
“He buys me coffee, Kurt,” she said. She read his name off his tag. “Nobody’s done that for me in years.”
The next morning, the green Honda was there anyway. Kurt glared at it the whole time, but he never made the call. I think he knew how it would sound out loud. “Officer, there’s a teenager buying lattes for a nurse.”
I ignored Kurt, and so did the boy.
By Christmas, I’d done the math on the back of an order pad. He’d been paying $4.85 every school morning since September, plus his own $2.75. Counting only the days I worked, that was more than a hundred and forty mornings, and over a thousand dollars.
For a kid in a rusty Honda with a cracked windshield and a muffler held on with a coat hanger, that was a fortune.
Where was a seventeen-year-old getting that kind of money? And why was he spending it on a woman he said he didn’t really know?
Then, on a Tuesday in February, the green Honda didn’t come.
It was snowing hard, the wet, heavy kind that snaps power lines. Bangor schools had announced a two-hour delay, so I figured that was it. He’d be sleeping in like every other kid in Penobscot County.
But the Corolla came, right on time.
That’s when the nurse rolled down her window and looked past me at the empty lot.
“Where’s my boy?”
He didn’t come Wednesday, or Thursday.
On Thursday, Kurt actually smiled. “Problem solved,” he said, tapping his stopwatch app. “Our average service time dropped eleven seconds.”
I didn’t answer him. I was watching the road.
On Friday, the nurse came through the line looking like she hadn’t slept in three days. Her hair was pulled back in a messy knot, and there were dark smudges under her eyes. Her hospital badge was clipped on crooked. For the first time, I could read the name on it: JOANNE PELLETIER, RN, CRITICAL CARE.
“Still no?” she asked.
I shook my head.
She gripped the steering wheel with both hands.
“I keep thinking something’s wrong,” she said. “I know that’s stupid. I don’t even know who he is. But I lie awake at night thinking about it.”
Then she hesitated, and her voice dropped.
“We had a kid come into the ICU Monday night. Car accident on Route 9, near the Hermon line. Black ice. Seventeen years old. He’s still not awake.”
She swallowed hard.
“I’m not on his case. I work the other unit, the cardiac side. I’ve only seen him through the glass when I walk past.”
“What did he look like?” I asked. My own voice sounded far away.
“Skinny. Brown hair.” She closed her eyes. “His things came in with him in a plastic bag. Patient belongings. They hang them on a hook outside the room. There was a gray hoodie in it.”
I felt my stomach drop right through the floor of that little red shed.
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