Summary

In the beginning of the story, the narrator describes two nurses standing outside a medical trailer, smoking. One of the nurses is a woman with "thin, pale arms" that "dangled from her scrubs" (1). She is attracted to the other nurse, a burly and muscular man who shifts while he speaks. The man had served in the Army and has a scar on his neck. He tells the woman about a nurse somewhere in Pennsylvania who had just confessed to murdering a number of patients.

The narrator explains that the woman had grown up with her mother, living in hotels for long-term renters. A guidance counselor at school had encouraged her to pursue community college and eventually go into nursing. The man grew up in Nevada on the Shoshone reservation. He and his mother eventually moved to Newburgh, New York. His mother and "new dad...