Nurse of Greenmeadow

(Genre: Dramatic Monologue) For NPR's 3 Minute Fiction

The nurse left work at 5 o’clock. The doctor left thirty minutes before her. The nurse was a younger woman, fair featured with a smile that did not reveal her teeth. The doctor was a middle-aged man, gray at his temples and through his brows. I was a single, middle-aged mother with a teenage son sitting alone in the waiting room of the Greenmeadow's cancer ward. I was watching their affair play out in front of me, of this I am certain.

He left a half of an hour before her each day. He would smile at her as he left, say goodbye to the two other nurses, wink at her, and leave. From there, I’m sure he would drive his Volvo away from the hospital and park in the hills behind it. Maybe get out of his car to relieve himself while he waited for her. I would study the nurse after he left. I could tell that she found the half hour without him excruciating – she acted, tried to cover it up. But I could see that the final 30 minutes of her day were spent anticipating a meeting with her lover, a middle-aged married doctor. How terribly cliche of them.

To think! That this sort of thing goes on in hospital waiting rooms, this adulterous mayhem, for anyone’s eyes to see. It was something I was shocked to find. Several months ago my son called terrified from his college dorm room and told me that he had found a lump in his testicle. I was leaving the grocery store and was shocked to hear my son speak of his testicle on the telephone in the middle of the day. I nearly dropped my groceries. Then I was hit by a wave of panic. My only son was potentially ill and was scared and I wanted nothing more than to sweep him up.

The truth was, several months later I was still uncomfortable with all the talk of my son’s testicle. Shortly after he called to reveal to me that he had found the lump in the shower, I worried it was my fault. I worried that maybe it was because I didn’t love him enough or that I let him sit in the hot tub at my sister’s house too much when he was a little boy. Or worse – that perhaps my own discomfort with my genitals resulted in the abnormal growth he found on his own. These were foolish thoughts to think, I know. But I could not shake them.

I distracted myself by becoming a deep observer of others, trying to decipher their goings on. That day I had watched and discovered that the nurse left work exactly a half hour after the doctor and they were having an affair – Of this, I could be sure. I sat back and watched as the nurse found petty things to do in her final thirty minutes at work. She replaced files and made small talk with other nurses. Hussy.

I sat on a couch with a pile of gardening magazines beside me. In front of me I held a paperback romance novel I picked up at the grocery store. I looked over the book at the nurse station where the young adulteress flitted about. Beyond her was a hallway, and beyond that was a room where my son removed his pants and underwear and sat on a table. He was staring at the ceiling waiting for someone to enter the room and begin. That day they were doing a sort of ultrasound on his testicles, or so the hussy nurse explained.

My son, Logan was uncomfortable too. He laid down naked from the waist down beneath several white blankets in the examining room. He's an only child. Everything is harder for an only child of a single mom. Finally two nurses entered the room with the lab technician and they began. The hussy nurse sat beside him as the lights were dimmed. “We’re going to begin now,” she said somewhat coyly. She spread the blankets away from his middle region, found his testicles and brought them out before laying the blankets back down around them. He stared up beneath the blankets with his testicles exposed. “So are you in college?” the nurse asked as she applied a cold gel to his testicles. “Ugh, I’m…” he responded uncomfortably.

The lab technician interrupted, “I’ll take over from here, thank you Shelby.” Shelby, the hussy nurse glanced up at the clock as she removed her gloves and left the room. It was nearly five o’clock and she was happy and smiling smugly. She was leaving to meeting her older lover. She hung her lab coat on a rack, pulled her hair down from a ponytail and passed me as she left. “Have a good evening, Mam,” she said as she passed and placed her hand on my shoulder. Don’t you dare touch me, I thought to myself. I sort of nodded in her direction. And returned to my romance novel.