The Tides Read Online Free Page B

and losses, as if there was nothing else to them, and he'd just shudder or laugh and give some variation of the standard response: 'God, those places are depressing ! And they stink! I don't know how you can stand it.' Kurt worked with children, where he said there was hope.
     
    Rebecca's parents wouldn't understand, either; she didn't even try to explain her excitement and pleasure to them. 'I don't understand you,' her mother had been saying all Rebecca's life, sometimes in admiration, sometimes pity, sometimes out of some sort of fear. Billie Emig was spending a lot of time at The Tides since Rebecca's father had been admitted, but she made it plain that she loathed the necessity of having her husband there, and defended herself against the joy and tragedy and fun of the place as she'd always defended herself, by feeling both guilty and superior. And Rebecca didn't think her father had ever been much interested in anything, except, at times, her; senility hadn't changed that.
     
    A lot of people in the business also didn't share her involvement, not to say obsession. They just worked there. Or they were investors, and maybe the rumors of greed and corruption at the ownership level were true. Dan Murphy, her boss, never objected to her plans for getting away from the medical model and creating a community at The Tides; he never acknowledged them, either. 'Census, babe,' was his refrain. 'The name of the game is census. Keep those beds full and everybody's fucking happy. Including me.'
     
    She knew the assumption inside the company and out was that she and Dan Murphy were sleeping together, or at least that he had lecherous designs, and she still worried that this compromised her position. But, by reputation, he'd slept with nurses' aides as well as Directors of Nursing, with housekeeping new-hires as well as Health Department surveyors who'd been around for decades.
     
    He seemed to her less a predator or barterer than an opportunist, and she wondered about even that, for he was hardly, in any ordinary sense, an attractive man. Abrasive and impatient, crude, not easy to be around, certainly not easy to work for, he had eyes small enough, in a fleshy face, to be called beady, a reedy voice with almost no affect, clumpy orangish hair, a squat body that surely would make no heads turn.
     
    What would it be like to have an affair with Dan Murphy? she wondered, but the fantasy wouldn't stick.
     
    When he walked the halls of The Tides, many people didn't know who he was. But in a few deceptively casual minutes he would have learned which handrails were loose, what was causing the odor at the end of Wing 1, which rooms didn't have clean towels, which residents were ready for discharge, which staff were fucking up on the job and which were going above and beyond. Sometimes he would tell the administrator these things and sometimes he would keep them to himself until they could be used to greatest advantage.
     
    She wanted to learn how to do that. She wanted to be that sure of something.
     
    Rebecca didn't mind the business aspects of running a nursing home, and was confident that, once hospital discharge planners and doctors became familiar with the innovative programs she intended to develop at The Tides, she could, in fact, fill the empty beds and keep them full. She'd already started trying out some of her ideas for humanizing the institution, such as the mural on the lounge wall — Lisa had managed to persuade all the painters but the surly Bob Morley to redo their work after Rebecca's father had painted over it, and Bob's sun had been high enough to escape most of the whitewash anyway.
     
    Walking along Hammond Street toward Elm, Rebecca laughed wryly to herself. But thinking of her father, open-mouthed and utterly baffled as though he didn't know the incriminating brush in his hand was still oozing globs of white paint, while her mother castigated him and Rebecca and the rest of the staff and fate in general for the