Smoke Break with Mama Metcalf

SMOKE BREAK WITH MAMA METCALF

Emily met Mama Metcalf her third day on the job.

Three hours in and overdue for her first break, Emily sought refuge in the courtyard accessible through the break room. Although ‘courtyard’ seemed too fancy a description for the space, which she could tell from peering through the staffroom window was empty except for a weathered picnic table and the woman sitting at it. Emily gripped her fourth coffee of the morning in one hand and gripped the handle with the other.

She closed her eyes and in the dark imagined warmer weather greeting her. Sunshine on her face. The smell of wafting barbeque. Yes, the outdoor setting might even pass as halfway inviting mid-year, so long as she ignored the enclosing nine-foot wall, the one fringed with bales of razor-wire.

Ignored the dead pigeon snagged in the barbs.

The door creaked open. As expected, the day was bitter, but Emily found the frigid air preferable to the antiseptic foulness she was leaving behind, if only for fifteen minutes. Potential pneumonia was preferable to staying a single unpaid minute inside the hospice.

The past three days had been a blur of soiled sheets, vomit clean-up duties, sponge baths, assisted feeds—work normally performed by the unpaid volunteers. She suspected Woods was testing the elasticity of her dedication, giving her all the shit chores to see if she would stick with it.

Woods doesn’t know anything about me if she thinks I’ll be scared off that easy.

Emily pulled her coat tight around her. Though it wasn’t currently snowing, a fresh layer of white covered the ground. Her footsteps crunched as she crossed the courtyard.

The woman at the picnic table was short, had brown hair streaked with gray, and wore a white set of scrubs. Her back was to the building, the vapor of her breath drifting up like smoke signals. If she heard Emily’s approach, she didn’t react.

“Hello there,” Emily said when she was close enough to reach out and touch the woman’s shoulder. She turned around; her creased face lit up in a smile.

The woman had to be in her 70s, at least. Emily also noted that it hadn’t been the woman’s breath she’d seen before; rather smoke from the crudely rolled cigarette pinched tight between her lips. “Oh, hey sugar. You must be new here.”

“Yes, I started earlier this week,” Emily said, walking around to sit on the opposite side of the picnic table. “I’m Emily Samuels. I don’t think we’ve met.”

“I’ve been out with a stomach bug, this is my first day back in a couple weeks. You don’t want to bring sickness in this place, sugar. It’ll only end up killing these folks quicker, and that’ll just leave us with even more work to do. Name’s Brenda Metcalf, but you can call me Mama Metcalf. Everybody does.”

“Nice to meet you.” And Emily sincerely meant that. There was something about the woman’s presence that made her feel at ease.

Is there a trace of a southern lilt to her accent? Yes, I think there just might be.

Sounds like the home place.

“I roll my own,” Mama Metcalf said when she noticed Emily eyeing the cigarette. “It’s cheaper to buy the loose tobacco and papers than getting a carton these days.”

“I see. So this is the smoking area?”

“Not really. Ain’t supposed to be no smoking anywhere on the property, but Woods looks the other way so long as I don’t leave my butts lying around. I put ‘em in a sandwich baggie and take ‘em with me when I leave. You want one?”

Emily shook her head. “I used to, but my husband made me quit when I got pregnant with our daughter.”

“Yeah, my oldest son’s always after me to shake the habit, so I tell him it’s my only real pleasure in life. Besides, I don’t usually finish a cigarette, just take a few puff-puffs.”

Emily sipped her coffee and wondered what life must be like for all the old women of the world whose sole pleasures came in the form of cheap hand-rolled cigarettes. But then her mind turned to the bottle of gin she had stashed away in her rental and decided she was in no position to judge.

“You’re not wearing a wedding ring,” Mama Metcalf said.

Emily thought of herself as a person divided into three parts. There was the Old Emily, the part that had quite happily existed up to the day she forgot the card. Then there was the part of her that would have suffered through Mama Metcalf’s question, a question that would have made her hands draw onto her lap, tucked away and hidden, curled up like wounded animals ashamed of their scars. Not anymore. She was Emily the Third—a mother who would never allow herself the disgrace of ever missing a beat.

“I’m not married anymore.”

“I hear ya. Finally divorced my old man about five years back. Straw that broke the camel’s hump was when he beat me with the Christmas tree.”

Emily was so stunned by the comment that she didn’t know how to respond. She was still trying to think of something to say when the door to the building opened and the male nurse she was working with earlier popped his head out. “Hey, New Girl.”

Emily stiffened, her lips stretching into a rictus of a smile. “Just a reminder my name’s Emily, not ‘New Girl’. All good?”

“No need to get your panties in a bunch, honey. It’s a revolving door of nurses around here, so I don’t bother learning names ‘til I’m sure they’re gonna stick around.”

A sharp retort rose to her lips. Swallowed it down. She’d only just met Mykel (“Pronounced like Michael but spelled M-Y-K-E-L,” he said when they first met, though Emily doubted that was the spelling on his birth certificate) and her tolerance for him was already waning. Emily hoped they wouldn’t have to work together too often, but considering how short-staffed the hospice was, she had a feeling she was fresh out of luck.

“I gotta get back inside, almost time to give out meds,” Mama Metcalf said, stubbing her cigarette on the heel of her shoe, and then placing it inside a Ziploc bag. She sealed it up and stuffed it in a small black purse on the bench next to her. “Also wanna see what they got good in the vending machine. I forgot to pack a lunch today.”

“Well, it’s not much,” Emily said, “but I brought a couple of bananas from home and left them on top of the staff fridge inside. You’re welcome to them.”

“Thank you but I can’t eat bananas no more,” Mama Metcalf said, scuttling back across the courtyard. “I had my gallbladder took out a couple years ago, so I can’t filter the seeds.”

With that quizzical statement, she walked through the door Mykel was holding open for her and disappeared.

“She’s a hoot, but I’m confused,” Emily said.

Mykel walked over to the picnic table. “Confused by which part? The part where she thinks those little black things in a banana are real seeds, or the part where she thinks the gallbladder’s job is to filter seeds?”

“Both actually. She’s a nurse?”

“Oh no, Mama Metcalf is one of our non-medical volunteers.”

“But she just said she was going to be giving out meds.”

“Yeah, well, truth is this place is barely scraping by with what little funding we get, and private donations are one step up from zilch. Rules get bent.”

“Great, so I’m using my BSN degree to clean shitty sheets while some senior citizen off the street is giving meds.”

“You’re just going through your initiation period, but you must be moving up in the world, New Girl. Woods wants you in her office pronto to observe an intake interview.”

Emily stood. “Intake? I didn’t know we were expecting any new guests today.”

“We weren’t. We had a drop and run this morning. A kid. Looks like we’re going to be cramming a new zombie on the hall.”

Emily frowned at Mykel as she passed. “It’s against facility policy to call them ‘zombies’. You know that, right?”

“New Girl,” Mykel said as he followed her into the building, “you’re not going to last here very long if you don’t lighten up.”