Sweep the Floor

I was thirty-three years old, a registered nurse with eleven years of hospital experience, and I was sorting other people's paperwork in a windowless office at ten o'clock at night, and I want to tell you it was Melanie's fault, though the truth is it was mostly my pride.

Pride is a funny thing, or maybe it isn't funny at all, and maybe I only call it funny now because it's easier than calling it what it was, which was stupid. Two years ago I'd have laughed if somebody told me I'd end up on a temp assignment at VitalCare Records, a strip-mall outfit that stores old medical files for clinics too cheap to do it themselves, but here's how it happened, more or less. I quit my hospital job in January because I got passed over for the charge nurse position, and when the director asked me why I looked so sour about it I said something about how I didn't want to work somewhere that couldn't see what I was worth, and I said it with my chin up, and I meant every word, and then I spent three months eating through my savings because there weren't a lot of openings for a nurse with a bad attitude and a reputation for it.

Melanie had known me since nursing school, since we were both twenty-two and terrorizing our clinical instructors, and she still worked at the hospital, and when she saw the temp listing through her brother-in-law's staffing agency she sent it to me with a message that said take it or starve, your choice, and I called her a few names and then I took it. It was data entry, technically, typing old paper records into a system, and it paid less than half of what I used to make, and the agency had exactly one slot left when I called, which was the overnight shift at VitalCare, ten to six, alone in a room full of filing cabinets with the office manager, and I said yes before I could think about it, which is how pride works, it moves fast so you can't catch it.

The office was in the back half of a strip mall between a nail salon and a payday loan place, and there were no windows at all in the records room, just fluorescent tubes that flickered every fourth one and a row of gray cabinets that ran the length of the wall and a rack of servers humming in the corner like a hive nobody could find. My neighbor across the hall at my apartment complex turned out to be the office manager, which I didn't know until my first night, when she opened the door with her badge and said oh great, it's you, and I said lovely to see you too, Bailey, and that set the tone for the whole week.

Bailey was thirty-one and she talked like every sentence was an invoice, short and itemized and due immediately, and I couldn't stand her, or I thought I couldn't stand her, and the difference between those two things took me longer to figure out than it should have. She'd had a girlfriend for two years, I learned from the break room gossip before I ever learned it from her, some woman who'd moved away to another city and ended it, and Bailey never mentioned her and never mentioned much of anything except the work, which was always behind, which was always my fault in some way I couldn't quite identify.

* * *

It was Thursday of my second week, a little after eleven, when my phone buzzed on the desk. Melanie had sent a photo she'd clearly taken off the agency's own page, me at my little table with a carton of files open in front of me and my hair pinned up wrong and my face doing something sour, and the caption said You're welcome.

I rolled my eyes at the screen and typed back that she was a terrible friend and a worse photographer, and she sent back a row of laughing faces, and I put the phone face down and got back to the files, and that was when I looked up and saw Bailey standing in the doorway watching me.

I don't know how long she'd been there. She had that still way of standing, arms crossed, weight on one hip, and she didn't say anything, just looked at me with that flat expression she wore like a uniform, and I felt my face go warm because of course she'd seen me grinning at my phone like an idiot, texting somebody at work, on her shift, on her dime or the agency's dime, whatever way she wanted to count it.

"Melanie," I said, holding up the phone like that explained anything.

"Your break was twenty minutes ago," she said, and turned and walked back down the hall, and that was it, no lecture, no joke, nothing, and somehow that was worse than a lecture.

I sat there a minute with my ears still hot, looking at the carton in front of me, 1988 through 1991, some dermatology practice that had folded, hundreds of folders in no order at all, and I thought about pride again, which was becoming a habit I didn't enjoy. Pride had gotten me here and pride was going to keep me here, that much was clear, because the smart move would have been to swallow it, call the hospital director, eat whatever words she wanted me to eat, and get my old job back or something close to it, and I hadn't done that and I wasn't going to, and every night I packed files in a gray room I could feel that decision sitting on my shoulders like a coat I couldn't take off.

The thing about Bailey, and I'd been noticing it in spite of myself, was that she never wasted a word and never softened one, and I kept responding to that quality the way you respond to cold water, a shock and then a strange alertness. When she told me a box was mislabeled she was right, it was mislabeled, and when she told me the scanner was down she'd already checked the cable, and when she said the overnight shift was hers because nobody reliable would take it, she said it plain, like a fact about weather, and I'd caught myself, more than once, watching her mouth move and thinking about how there wasn't a single syllable in it she didn't mean.

She was attractive, that was the other thing, the thing I was trying not to file away with the rest of it. Tall, dark hair cut short, forearms she apparently saw no reason to hide, a way of moving through the cabinet aisles like she owned every drawer in them, and I'd been single since a brief and amiable fling with a coworker when I was twenty-eight that had ended the way those things end, with both of us agreeing it was nice and neither of us meaning it, and it had been a while, long enough that I noticed things like forearms and held the noticing a beat too long.

I got up and walked down the hall to where the break room was, mostly to prove I'd heard her, and she was at the counter filling the little coffee pot from the tap, and she didn't look up when I came in.

"You were smiling at your phone," she said, still not looking up.

"My friend sent me a photo," I said. "Of me. Working here."

"Why?"

"Because she's the one who got me the job, and she thinks it's funny."

Bailey set the pot on the burner and clicked it on, and then she did look at me, and her eyes did something I hadn't seen them do before, a flicker of interest, quickly shut. "The hospital job," she said. "Nursing. You gave that up."

"I didn't give anything up," I said, too fast, and she nodded like I'd answered the question anyway, which I suppose I had, and she picked up her mug and walked past me into the hall, close enough that I caught soap and cigarette smoke, and said over her shoulder that break rooms were for breaks and the files weren't going to enter themselves, and I stood there a minute in the little room with the humming refrigerator and thought, not for the first time, that I was in some kind of trouble I couldn't name yet.

The night went on the way the nights went, folders and keystrokes and the fourth fluorescent tube flickering its slow stutter, and around midnight Bailey looked at her watch and said she was going out for a cigarette and I surprised us both by saying I'd come along, and she shrugged like it cost her nothing, though later I'd learn that shrug of hers could hold just about anything, and we went out the back door into the strip mall parking lot, where the payday loan place had its sign lit up pink and there was nothing else, no moon, just the two of us and a metal ashtray on a pole and the sound of the highway a few blocks off.

She lit mine for me without asking, cupping her hand around the lighter, and I thought, standing there in the dark with the smoke going into my lungs like it used to when I was younger and stupider, that I had maybe misread this woman from the beginning, and I had no idea yet how right I was about that, or what it was going to cost me, or what it was going to give me, sitting in that parking lot at midnight with a carton of files still waiting for us both inside.

* * *

The tour, back in my first week, when it finally came, was the second night, and Bailey gave it the way a surgeon gives one, walking fast through the dark hallways and pointing at things without slowing down, and I followed along like a new hire because that was exactly what I was, temp badge clipped to my shirt, trying to keep up and trying not to look like I was trying. The back closet first, a windowless room stacked floor to ceiling with cartons, shelves bolted to cinder block, and she flipped the light with her elbow and said this was overflow, it wasn't in the system, and if I ever went looking for anything in there I should tell her first, because the order it was stacked in made sense to her and only to her, and I said fine, and she looked at me a beat longer than she needed to, like she was checking whether fine meant fine, and then we moved on.

The break room I'd already seen, but she showed me the rest of it, the dead plant on the windowsill that had come with the building, brown and skeletal in its pot, and she said somebody watered it for a while out of guilt and then even the guilt died, and there was a vending machine that ate dollars and a first aid kit nobody had opened since before her time, and she'd checked, she said, because that was the kind of person she was. Last was the server rack in the corner of the records room, a black cabinet humming low and steady, and she stood in front of it with her arms crossed and said the whole building ran through this thing, every record for every practice they stored, and if it went down she'd be the one explaining it at eight in the morning to people who didn't know what a server was, so I should learn its sound, and I stood there listening to it, that low hum, and it did sound like a heartbeat, steady and a little too warm in the chest, and I said I'd learn it, and she nodded once and that was the end of the tour.

So then it was just the work, night after night, and by that Thursday of my second week I'd settled into the rhythm of it, folders in, folders out, the dermatology practice from 1988 through 1991 that I was sorting and keying, and the fourth tube still flickering overhead like it was thinking about quitting. Bailey worked at her desk in the front with the door half open, and every so often she'd come back and pull a drawer and find what she needed and leave again without a word, and I'd gotten so I could tell her mood by the sound of her heels on the tile, which sounds crazy, I know, but you spend eight hours in a room with a heartbeat and a woman, you start noticing things.

It was around one in the morning, the dead hours, when she came back with a carton in her arms, one of the older ones, corners soft with age, and she said she wanted it sorted onto the shelf before she