Page 2 of The Panther’s Edge

“Bad one?” she asked.

“I’m fine.”

“Didn’t ask if you were fine.”

I looked away and blinked hard a couple of times, trying to stop the tears. It was almost six in the morning in a parking garage.

“I liked him,” I finally said. “The blizzard of ’78. He walked his whole route. Not one person got their mail late.”

“I know,” she said. “He told me. Twice.”

“He told everybody.”

“He sure did.”

We stood there for a minute, not saying anything. Then she shifted her bag around and gave me a long look, the kind she usually saved for interns about to make a mistake.

“Wes. When’s your next stretch off?”

“Starting tomorrow. Four days.”

“What are you doing with it?”

“Sleep. Gym.” I shrugged. “I need to go to Costco.”

“Costco,” she repeated, like I’d said something obscene. “Four days off and your biggest concern is going to Costco?”

“I’m out of paper towels, Roz.”

She stared at me a moment longer. Then she dug into her bag, came out with a pen and one of those little notepads the drug reps leave everywhere, and wrote something down. She tore off the page, folded it in half, and held it out.

“What’s this?”

“An address.”

I unfolded it. An address in the warehouse district, in her blocky handwriting. No name, no phone number, nothing else.

“What’s in the warehouse district?”

“A bathhouse.”

I looked up at her. She looked back at me, completely unbothered, like she’d just told me where to get my oil changed.

“What is this, Roz?”

“Just what I said,” she nodded. “A bathhouse. One of my boys is like you, gay as the day is long. He swears by it. Says it’s a great place to relax.”

I lifted an eyebrow, distracted just long enough for the tears to stop flowing. “Are you sending me to a sex club, Roz?” I shook my head. “Isn’t that a little… I don’t know… unprofessional?”

“I gave you an address, Callahan,” she said, not backing down an inch. “You can do what you want with it. But I need you to hear one thing first.”

“Here we go…”

“Shut your mouth and listen to me,” she commanded in that motherly tone she used with everyone that was dangerously close to getting on her nerves. “I’ve been working this shift damn near my whole life. I know what it’s like to live in the dark that never ends. You forget how to be a person, how to laugh, how to do anything that feels normal.” She let out a long sigh. “But I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I did, Wes. I missed my boys growing up and lost a lot of time with my husband that I’ll never get back. But you’re still young and you need to live a little bit. I know Mr. Okafor was nice, but he shouldn’t be the closest thing you have to family in this place. That’s just not healthy.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but she held up a hand.

“I’m not done,” Roz said. “You think you’re fine because you’re good at your job and you show up and you do the work. But fine isn’t enough, Wes. Fine is what kills you slowly. You need something else. You need people, or hobbies, or a reason to take a shower that isn’t because you’re about to go to work. You need to remember what it feels like to want something.”