Doug had asked her out. After working with him for two months, Jackie had given up all hope of him being interested in her other than her X-rays. But now they had a date for the weekend. She couldn’t keep the smile off her face.
When she stumbled out of her bedroom, Patricia noticed immediately. “What happened to you?”
“Not much. I’m just trying to figure out what to wear on my date this weekend with Doug.” She did a little shimmy dance as she scooted around her roommate to get to the coffee machine.
“Finally! When did he ask you?”
“Just before we served dinner last night.”
She didn’t have any other information to offer. The conversation had been too rushed, and the details were all pending. But for now, she could book off Sunday afternoon in her calendar, and scratch an item off her bucket list that had been there since high school: go out with Doug Little.
It was nice that the reunion crew had such great summer weather the day before, because the sun was nowhere in sight in the morning. The rain started at dawn and had grown steadily heavier as the morning progressed. Jackie didn’t care. She had a date.
She didn’t blink when nine o’clock rolled around. If she hadn’t been wired about the night before, she’d just be rolling out of bed at that time too. By ten o’clock, she’d showered and was feeding her first load of laundry into the communal machines in the basement. By noon, both loads were washed, dried, and put away. She’d double-checked her phone to make sure it was fully charged.
At two o’clock, it finally rang. Jackie forced herself to finish her row of knitting before she answered it. She didn’t want to seem too eager, especially since Doug had taken his sweet time about calling her. “Hello,” she said casually, not looking at the screen.
“Hi, Jackie. It’s Louise.”
Double bad luck. First, it wasn’t Doug. Second, she knew her friend was working a full shift today. She wouldn’t be calling to chat. “I’m not on call today.” The hospital board had cut back on her “on call” hours as well.
“I know. We could send the patient to Virden to do the X-ray and then bring him back, but I’m hoping you’d be willing to save us all the pain,” Louise Parker said. If Jackie could pick one person to work with at Hopewell Hospital, Louise was her first choice. Fifteen years older than Jackie, Louise was a nurse practitioner with enough experience to handle anything that came her way on the ward. If she said it was urgent, Jackie believed her.
“You don’t expect me to phone the doctor on call, do you?” Because buddies or not, there were some lines she refused to cross.
Louise coughed. “Of course not.”
“I’ll be right in.”
Jackie tucked her phone into her pocket. She didn’t pretend to be fashionable. She arrived at the hospital in heavy black rubber boots. “What have we got?”
“Junior St. James.”
Scarlett’s baby brother. The teenager was all long arms and legs and broad smiles like his sister had been at his age. “What happened?”
“He caught a wild pitch with his elbow at baseball practice.”
“Ouch. What did Dr. Roberts say?”
“I haven’t called him yet. I figured I’d wait ’til you told me if there was a break or not.”
“Good luck with that. He’s going to be annoyed, and loud about it, and not just because he says Saturdays are for fishing and putting practice.” It was mostly because he was on the board, and he argued every time they brought Jackie in when she was on call. He didn’t mind collecting overtime for himself, but heaven help any of the other specialists who expected to be compensated.
Junior and Mrs. St. James were in the waiting room. “Come on, Junior.” He was a good sport about her manipulating his sore arm and laughed when she told him to smile before taking the picture. It didn’t take long to identify a fracture in his humerus. Jackie stuck around after she gave her report to listen to Louise’s call.
“Hello, Dr. Roberts…Yes, I know what time it is…Yes, I know it’s Saturday afternoon and I’m sure it’s important enough to call you away from your grandson’s baseball game…” Louise pointed at the receiver. “The same game Junior was supposed to be playing at,” she mouthed.
Jackie rolled her eyes so hard she gave herself a headache. If she were sixty-eight, she wouldn’t be raring to come to work on a Saturday either. Of course, if she were sixty-eight, she’d like to have been retired for eight years already.
If Hopewell had more doctors, it wouldn’t be an issue. Sure, Doug Little was there now, but Dr. Roberts had already announced he’d be retiring as soon as Doug established himself. With their lack of full-time staff, it was a wonder the doors were still open.
Jackie tried to shake the thought out of her head. She didn’t want to think about staffing problems until it was absolutely necessary.
Louise hung up. “Well, he’s upset at the interruption.”
“Shocker.”
“He said to use chemical ice packs to reduce the swelling while we’re waiting,” Louise reported. “He’s coming in to see what the images show.”
Jackie didn’t have to hang around. The pictures weren’t going to change. Unfortunately, she didn’t get out of the hospital fast enough. A leak announced itself in the X-ray room due to a brand-new crack in the ceiling. It took her an hour to move the equipment she could and cover what she couldn’t, before she made an emergency call to the hospital administrator, Mr. Victor Lang, to tell him they needed to get maintenance moving immediately. He was less thrilled to hear from her than Dr. Roberts was.
By the time she was finished with that, the doctor was waiting for her. He kindly told her he would not be filing an official reprimand for taking unnecessary X-rays on the say-so of a nurse. Even so, Jackie knew she’d be on his unofficial troublemaker’s list for the next month or so. “Since you weren’t officially requested, I don’t imagine we’ll be seeing a timesheet entry for today, will we?” he asked.
“I imagine you will, Dr. Roberts. Unless you’d like to explain to the union who was taking X-rays, if I wasn’t called in and paid for it.” It wasn’t the first time he’d asked her to work for free. In fact, it happened more often than not. The first couple times, Jackie had tried to be amenable, be a team player. Then she understood that the requests weren’t one-offs. They were expected.
So was her rent.
“I’m disappointed in you, Jackie,” Dr. Roberts said, shaking his head.
She held her tongue and took the verbal slap. She would be getting paid, whether he liked it or not, but it wasn’t worth dragging Louise down into the mud with her for calling her in. But she only wrote down half the amount she worked on her timesheet. As she said, she had to charge the hospital something, but she didn’t want to make things more uncomfortable for herself than they already were.
To make matters worse, Doug still hadn’t called. Maybe she’d misunderstood. Maybe he hadn’t meant a date. Maybe just a casual afternoon hanging out together. As friends.
She didn’t want to be friends.
Every straw the day added weighed another ton. When she stumbled through the door, she tripped on the mat. Jackie kicked her crocs off and let them fall where they may. Yes, she was throwing a tantrum, and she didn’t care. She had to face the truth.
Jackie had fallen out of love with radiology.
This was the first time she admitted it to herself. And she hated that she hated it. When she started her training, she’d loved the science and mystery of what she did. She had ever since she discovered Superman had X-ray vision and the dentist could look inside her mouth the same way with an X-ray machine. It was too cool! By the time she’d finished her college program, the shine had rubbed off, and she was stuck with thousands of dollars in student loans with no way to pay them off except to do a job she no longer enjoyed.
Now she had to add office politics to the mix, and it wore her down faster. Dr. Roberts’s reprimand and budget cuts, broken down machinery and irregular hours: all of it made her dread getting up in the morning.
She fell onto the sofa, grateful for the empty apartment. She needed to get her head together. She took a deep breath, trying to breathe the stress of the day away, and let her mind wander. A tea-coloured stain in the corner of the living room ceiling drew her eye.
Her apartment block was old. Very old. She and Patricia each had decent sized rooms. But aside from a fresh coat of paint when they’d moved in, and a new fridge after their last one died the year after they renewed their first lease, it was exactly the same as the day it was built. Jackie suspected it even had the same carpet. She and Patricia weren’t due for that upgrade for another year, according to the super’s schedule.
She loved Hopewell, but what was once safe and familiar was now threatening to stifle her. The town needed a good shake up, or influx of new blood, or something to give her a good reason not to give up on it, because she couldn’t continue as things were.
That wasn’t to say it was a bad town. The baby boom of the forties and fifties had resulted in a building boom in the sixties and seventies. Hopewell had been something to see back then, so she’d heard. The farming town had supported the community; it had been a hub of commerce for those not wanting to drive an hour to Brandon or three to Winnipeg. But it hadn’t held on to its possibilities; it saw businesses die out one by one and families move on to greener prospects. If it weren’t for the hospital and the school, Hopewell would have faded away altogether.
These days, the hospital was part of the problem. Not enough doctors, not enough nurses, not enough money for technicians, let alone repairs. If it went, a lot of the town would quickly follow. Her job would be the first to go. It was already on the block.
She couldn’t stay without a job. She could barely afford to stay with one, and that was with a roommate. If the hospital folded, fewer people would be able to hire her to do catering, and the cycle would continue. She was going to need a third job.
In a place that could barely provide one.
Maybe she should follow her classmates’ examples and get out of town while she still could. Last night had opened her eyes. Of the dozen former Hopewell Secondary students, the half who had left town had become rock stars in their various occupations. Those who stayed were struggling to keep their heads above water.
She heard a key scratch at the lock but made no attempt to get up. “Ugh,” she said in greeting when Patricia finally made it through the door.
“And a gracious good afternoon to you too. What’s wrong? You were in such a good mood earlier.”
“That was before I got called in to work on my day off, and then got yelled at for expecting to be paid for going in to work on my day off. Oh, and Doug didn’t call.” It was after four, almost five in the afternoon. She knew he hadn’t been called into the hospital, so she scratched that excuse off his list of possible reasons.
Patricia dropped onto the sofa beside her. “He never called? The jerk!” She reached for her phone.
“No!” She wasn’t going to let her best friend call the guy she had a crush on and berate him for not asking her out. Jackie didn’t have much going for her at this point, but she still had her pride. “If he wanted to call, he’d call.”
“I’m going to kill him.”
“You’re not going to kill him.”
“I’m going to use the emergency key he gave me and sneak into his bedroom and put itching powder in his sheets,” Patricia compromised.
The corners of Jackie’s mouth turned up. “Maybe.” Her amusement didn’t last long. “Can you sneak into Dr. Roberts’ house and put it there too?”
Patricia had heard this story before. “Are they going to cut your hours again?”
“It’s looking that way.” Another truth admitted, and it scared her more than the first. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t.” The words tumbled out of her mouth before she could stop them. “Aside from you and a handful of friends, I have no reason to stay in Hopewell. As soon as he sees my timesheet, Victor Lang is going to call me into his office, and I think he’s either going to cut my hours again or let me go completely.”
Jackie was stunned to discover tears flowing down her cheeks. She’d put on a brave face for so long, she’d fooled herself into thinking it was the truth. “Doug isn’t interested, and there are no other men in Hopewell I’m interested in dating. I have no chance of having a social life unless I’m willing to drive for over an hour to meet someone. I’m killing myself working two jobs and that is barely covering my bills. I’m dying by degrees here. I want a life. Don’t I deserve that?”
The tears turned into sobs. Perhaps most surprising was her best friend’s reaction. Relief, not shock. “Yes, you deserve a life. Let’s find a way to get you one.”