I don't remember any of that

"I don't remember any of that," Annabelle says with her annoying, faintly defiant blandness.
"I remember you" he accuses, "and thinking how nice you were. I admired your ear. You were going with a boy called Jamie and worked at some old people's place out around the old the fairgrounds."
"Sunnyside," she says. "My ear?" she asks. Self-consciously she touches her right ear, exposed by the fluffy short-cut hair there. Her hair, a touch damp from waiting in the rain, is brown, with auburn highlights that seem natural and a fair amount of gray sprinkled in. Time is pressing on her though her face pretends not to feel it.
"It hadn't been pierced." He doesn't say it reminded him of his own. He had also liked the way she bulged toward him in certain places, her plump upper lip and the fronts of her thighs when she stood. Some would say she is heavy now but in this county the men are accustomed to that. How had she avoided getting married?
"My mother wouldn't let me," Annabelle was saying. "I guess it was superstitious of her, she said she liked me natural, the way I had been born. Boy, I wonder what she would say with some of the girls now. Even the young nurses, the body piercing, navel, nipple, you name it. I ask them, how can it be sanitary, and they say their boyfriends like it. One more thing to play with, I guess." She blushes and lowers her eyes.
The soup comes, the flowery thin soup The Greenery cooks up with broccoli florets and frothy bean sprouts and slices of water chestnut so thin as to be transparent. Nelson and Annabelle bow their faces into the heat of the soups and realize that their time together is being consumed. "I'm sorry," she says, "I don't remember that party better. Maybe I was stoned."
"No, no, it was me who was stoned. Stoned or wired, that's what I usually was back then. After my father died I got religion, more or less, and earned the certificate to be a mental-health counsellor. Don't you think it's strange, by the way, how both you and I are caregivers?"
"Not if we're related," she says. "I believe in genetics. And health care is an expanding field, as the world fills up with people that would have been dead a hundred years ago. Everybody winds up needing care, pretty much."
"Yeah, you wonder if it's worth all the effort. I mean, you're keeping these Alzheimer's wrecks going when they don't even know enough to thank you, and I knock myself out to keep a bunch of depressive loonies from killing themselves, when if they did it it would save the government a fair amount of money."
She looks at him, her mouth prim until she swallows the spoonful of soup, and says, "Nelson. You don't mean that. In the abstract, you can feel that way, but not when you're face to face with the patient. I go on these teams Hospice sends around. Even at the very end, there's something in there, a soul or whatever, you have to love."
"Especially when you're being paid to love it," he says, wondering if one of the water-chestnut slices has gone bad. A specialty place like this, you don't get the turnover to keep the produce fresh; they give it one more day than they should. The other customers here when they entered are one by one leaving, though a small cluster hangs this side of the door, waiting for a sudden sideways squall of rain to let up. The ceiling lights glow as if evening is coming on, though it's not yet one o'clock.