Genevieve La Salle enjoyed her morning walk down Douglass Avenue, past the Seven Pools, across the bottleneck where Lyndale and Hennepin Avenues merged and through Jewett’s Park. She could always go around the southside of it, which was a more direct route to the hospital where she worked, but she preferred to walk over the bridge that crossed the little pond, where she would stop to feed the ducks and goldfish crumbs of crust from her morning slice of toast.
It
was a pleasant walk, even on a humid morning like this one.
She had left her
apartment feeling well-composed and pretty, she walked slowly so as not to
overheat. Her neat and freshly starched white uniform crinkled as she went, her
white shoes were quiet on the pavement, and her long dark curls were tightly
coifed in her nurses cap.
Genevieve was proud
of her profession.
She
went past the shuffleboard and the tennis courts, where she might see some
young men playing at their games.
She liked to see
them shirtless and sweating.
Genevieve was always
on the lookout for one particular fellow, a man who looked to be her age,
perhaps a little younger.
He was tall and
handsome, and wore a suit that looked like it needed mending.
She
would often see him sitting on a bench reading the paper, or perhaps writing in
a notebook and smoking…which Genevieve did not like.
There was something
mysterious about him and she found it alluring.
On
occasion they said good morning to one another. He was always polite, and she
was always demure, but she did not see him today.
Genevieve
had been thinking about him, and now she felt the emptiness of disappointment
that comes…not from losing something, but from not having her expectations met.
She
was still thinking about him when she checked into the nurse’s station at Abott
Northwestern, east of the park.
Maybe
I’ll see him this afternoon, she thought to herself as she began her rounds,
having quickly recovered from that sense of void, and now she was feeling
hopeful again.
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