The screen door creaked open, and Jenny leaned out, her dark hair slipping free of its messy bun to fall around her face. “He’s asleep. If you want to take off now, I can handle things.”
“Are you sure? He’ll need his meds in an hour,” Daphne said.
“I know the drill,” Jenny assured her. If it had been one of Dale’s other two children, she wouldn’t have considered leaving. Lisa always got flustered and worried she’d misread the dosage or mixed up the medications, and Drew wouldn’t have offered in the first place, was rarely here despite living only twenty minutes away.
“I wouldn’t mind an evening to myself,” Daphne admitted.
“You’ve certainly earned it. You’ve been such a godsend,” Jenny said. “Dad just adores you.”
“He’s a wonderful man,” Daphne replied warmly, though she didn’t have much of an opinion about him. She knew it was terrible, but she never really cared to get to know her clients. She worked better thinking of them not as people but as a series of problems to solve. It wasn’t to say that she was cold toward them—after all, emotional needs were another part of the puzzle. Being kind, listening, offering the gentle chiding voice or the joke to brighten their mood, it was all part of the work. She liked to be good at things.
And when, inevitably, her clients died—she refused, in her own mind, to soften that with phrases like passed away or moved on—she considered the project complete.
She gathered up her purse. Jenny walked her to the door, and there Daphne stopped, waiting an extra moment because she could see the strain in Jenny’s eyes, the need to speak.
“It’s not going to be long, is it?” Jenny asked, when the silence grew into enough of an invitation.
“No. Not long at all,” Daphne said. “Days, maybe a week or two, in my experience. Though I’m not a doctor.”
“You’ve done this a lot, though,” Jenny said, almost a question. Daphne nodded, and Jenny looked away, scrubbing a tear from the corner of her eye with a kind of viciousness. “It’s not like we haven’t known it was coming.”
“That can make it easier, but it doesn’t make it easy,” Daphne recited.
“I should make sure Lisa and Drew come by,” Jenny said absently. She shook her head. “Sorry. I don’t mean to keep you.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Daphne reassured her, and Jenny flashed her teeth reflexively.
“Right. Tomorrow,” she said. She stood at the door, watching the whole time as Daphne made her way to her car and pulled away, gravel crunching under the wheels as she drove toward the distant lights of the city.
Later, alone in her apartment, Daphne turned on the television for some ambient noise and opened up her laptop. She clicked through a few bookmarked links, navigating to the fake profiles she had set up on various social media sites. Emma didn’t have any kind of social media presence, but her husband did. Nathan. Daphne had met him once. At the wedding. Emma had looked so shocked to see her there, it was almost funny.
She hadn’t even recognized Daphne at first—which Daphne supposed she couldn’t entirely fault her for. The last time they’d seen each other, Daphne had been a skinny teenager, no longer starved for her mother’s approval but still starving herself. It took a fainting spell in the middle of class and Mrs. Sawyer’s refusal to accept her excuses to get the help she needed, but slowly she had learned to cherish the taste of food melting on her tongue, and to love the soft contours of her body as they grew, the way moving through the world no longer hurt and how her body was no longer her enemy. Her face was full and round now, her eyes bright, her arms thick and strong. She took up space, and she liked it.
Once Emma had gotten over her shock, she had introduced Daphne to the groom, and with a kind of awkward haste attempted to integrate Daphne into the proceedings. She’d been all smiles and I’m-so-glad-you-could-make-it, but Daphne could tell Emma resented her presence, that this was not a welcome surprise.
As for the groom, she’d had only a brief conversation with him, and then her observations over the course of the evening to judge him by. It was enough to know he was a weak man. He preened when he got attention and sulked when he didn’t, took anything but adoration as a personal affront. Emma deserved better—but then, she had always played the part of caretaker and martyr in relationships. She had no faith in any relationship based in equality.
Now Daphne perused recent photos of Nathan—Nathan alone, Nathan with Emma, Nathan at happy hour with friends. There was no sign of what could have precipitated the message until she found the comment at the bottom of a photo from a few weeks ago, posted days after the photo had been taken. Love you, bro! We’ll miss you. Sucks not to see you every day. One of Nathan’s work friends. So Nathan was out of a job, then.