Free Skill Set by Vernon Rush Page A

brim with Coca-Cola and crushed ice, eased himself into the tiled room focused on not spilling a drop, smiling with pride. Another nurse, a male nurse with his stethoscope flopping on his chest, raced by the quivering statue that was Humphrey, bumped him with his clipboard causing both cold drinks to erupt into twin cataracts of dark coke syrup and miniature icebergs as they shot out of their heat-proof cups and turned the floor into a sticky, slippery miniature brown floodplain. The nurse ’s aide dry-heaved as she ran from the room and the attending turned around too quickly and his feet in their brand new Nikes slipped out from under him and he sustained a painful compression fracture of T-12, which distracted him from the imminent obstetrical need of the patient. She, Sarah, was still lying quietly on her side, but now with one leg bent upward and her hands desperately trying to cover herself with the lower part of the hospital gown. The young intern, himself in severe pain but not in a life-threatening condition, at least had the grace to shout a garbled instruction to the male nurse, who got the message and forgot the intern on the floor but began to give orders. In seconds, others had appeared and as they transferred Sarah to a gurney with wheels, she emitted a soft whimper and a baby’s head, covered in bloody streaks and plastered-down wispy hair, delivered itself while the grown-up people in the room tried to act like they knew what they were doing. There was nothing they could do but stop and help Sarah finish giving birth to a four-pound eleven-ounce little boy, who they named after the male nurse who had helped, Daniel Curtis Worthington. It was over an hour before they remembered the intern with the injured vertebra on the floor, but quietly waiting his turn. Humphrey had scooted on his butt over to the wall out of the way, as the crowd grew and the mess on the floor got even wetter. He just watched the chaotic activity and kept cleaning his glasses with a wadded-up handkerchief he kept for that purpose. Eventually, after Doctor McPherson sailed in like a Viking conquering an innocent, unsuspecting village of lesser beings, things calmed down a bit and Humphrey found the Men ’s and washed up before retracing his steps and locating Sarah in another two-bed patient room with a baby (a baby?) sleeping peacefully in a bassinet next to her, his miniature old-man’s face peeking from under a knitted cap. Sarah also was asleep so Humphrey glanced at the baby as if he thought it might explode and kill him instantly then he nodded toward Sarah as if she could see him through her translucent eyelids, and he wheeled around and rushed back to his job at the local Wal Mart’s auto supplies department. From that day forward, no one ever mentioned the birth of Daniel, because it wasn’t nearly as exciting as the ensuing repercussions that just about unnerved everyone involved and forever made Sarah feel guilty every time she looked at Daniel. He wore his inherited shame like a warrior carried a shield that was cracked and relatively useless for protection anyway. And he left home, with his parents’ blessings (and sighs of relief) as soon as he could which was after his high school graduation at fourteen and he never did understand how the two people he lived with could have had him as their son.
     

CHAPTER
10
    Daniel lied about his age and managed to get an intern position at the Target store in a town about forty miles from his folks’ house. Hampton, Iowa, had a YMCA a block off the main drag and the Christian church next door managed the renting of double rooms there for young men of Christian heritage and seriously representative of clean-living standards. They furnished coffee and apple juice and hard-boiled eggs every morning and at night, the amiable capable mountain of a woman who could cook anything she could catch or find, prepared a hearty soup or stew and sometimes even a cobbler when peaches or apples