Anne Haven - Because Of The Baby

“Harry,” he said. “Sounds like we have a problem here. Barbara tells me you haven’t been taking your meds.”

The man gave him a cranky look. He brushed back a chunk of his badly cut gray hair and then inspected the fingerless wool gloves he wore. “Barbara’s a bully.”

“She only wants to help you get better. If you don’t take your meds, Harry, you won’t get better.”

“I hate the meds.”

“I know. I’d hate taking ’em, too. But it’s the only way to make you improve. And if you don’t take ’em you’ll probably get worse. Keep this up and you’ll end up in the hospital.”

They both knew Harry had no health coverage, which was why he came to the free clinic. He couldn’t afford another emergency-room visit like the one last spring. He hadn’t been able to afford that one.

“Harry, help me out here. I know it’s a pain in the ass to take ’em three times a day. But Barbara can’t do anything for you if you ignore everything she says.”

“She says too much. She’s always on my back. I’m going to start calling her Nurse Ratched.”

Kyle tried not to grin, knowing he shouldn’t encourage the guy. But he couldn’t wait to tell Barbara about her new nickname. “I don’t think that’ll increase her level of friendliness, Harry.” He flattened his palms on the table and adopted a serious tone. “Look, buddy, I really need you to take those pills. Why don’t you try it for a week and we’ll take the rest as it comes, okay?”

Harry shot him a defiant glare. “The meds,” he announced, “give me gas.”

Kyle raised his eyebrows. “Oh, do they, now? Well, I can’t say I’d like that, either…It’s bad?”

“You don’t want to know.” And that, apparently, settled the matter. Harry grasped the edge of the table and supported himself as he rose to his feet. He adjusted the ragged old tweed coat he wore 365 days a year, rain or shine, heat or snow. “Well. Guess I’ll be going now.”

Kyle stood, too. “Hey, not so fast. I just had an idea. Hear me out?”

The other man turned back, head tilted, expression doubtful.

“There might be a solution,” Kyle said. “We’d have to talk to Barbara, but it might be possible to change your prescription. We could try to find something that isn’t so hard on your system.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a nurse or doctor. But sometimes more than one med can treat the same problem.”

Harry had his new bottle of meds by the time Melissa arrived for her weekly shift as a volunteer physician at the clinic. Through the doorway of his office Kyle heard Melissa greet Harry by name and the older man give her a cheerful, flirtatious response before leaving the clinic.

Kyle tried to focus on his paperwork. He had plenty this week, and a long list of phone calls to make for the fall fund-raising drive.

But he couldn’t concentrate. Never could on Wednesday afternoons, not since a certain hot summer night in July. He got that familiar, socked-in-the-gut feeling he had whenever he remembered it. Melissa, he thought, would be in to say hello any second.

Right on cue, she stuck her head through the doorway. “Hey, Kyle. How’s it going today?”

She wore her long white coat and a stethoscope looped around her neck. She always pulled her chocolate-brown hair back in a clasp at her nape; a few strands had escaped to graze her jaw. In one hand she held a clipboard; in the other, a half-eaten apple.

He smiled, knowing his face looked just as friendly and calm and unruffled as hers. “Great. Not too busy with the walk-ins. You’ve got some appointments?”

She glanced down at the clipboard. “That’s right.” She raised an eyebrow. “Mmm. I see Zita is scheduled for a visit. That should be colorful.”

Zita, a.k.a. Susan Smith, was a recovering addict with a variety of physical ailments caused by years of hard living. She had an eccentric personality and a loud voice.

“And a couple of new ones…” Melissa crunched on a bite of apple as she skimmed the notes. “Okay.” She swallowed and looked up at him.

“How’s your week going?” Kyle asked.

“Fine.” Her eyes met his and held them, but not for too long. Just long enough to show them both that everything was normal, routine, mundane, unremarkable. As it had been for the past five years. Just long enough to prove they weren’t avoiding eye contact. “My high-school chem teacher turned up in the E.R. last night.”

“Nothing serious, I hope.”

She shook her head. “Only a sprained ankle. Thought it might have been broken, but he was lucky. It was nice to talk to him—I hadn’t seen the man since graduation fifteen years ago.”

Melissa, an exceptionally bright and hardworking student, had finished high school at sixteen. She’d enrolled at Harvard med school three years later. Kyle had always found her intelligence incredibly sexy.

He took a deep breath. It’s none of your business, he told himself, whether she’s sexy or not. You’re just friends. That’s all you’ve ever been.

Except that crazy night in July.

But that had been a mistake. An aberration. They’d each had reasons for letting it happen—fine. But now they’d moved on. Put things back to normal.

A moment later Melissa tossed her apple core into the trash and went off to see to her patients. Kyle forced his attention back to his paperwork and phone calls.

He’d been running the health clinic, designed to serve the homeless and low-income population of Portland, Oregon, since he’d moved out west six years ago. Needing a change of scene. Needing to get away from all the memories of Felicity.

It had taken awhile to adjust. He’d had experience in nonprofits, but twenty-six had been young for this kind of position. Yet he’d thrown himself into the job, welcoming the challenge and the distraction. He’d barely had a personal life that first year, but he hadn’t wanted one—he’d found it almost intolerable to interact with anyone when it wasn’t part of his job.

Kyle remembered all the nights he’d gone home to his empty apartment, unable even to summon the energy to feed himself dinner before collapsing, still clothed, into bed. Welcoming the blankness of sleep.

But things had gotten better. He’d emerged from that brooding, self-pitying year and started to recapture his old self. Back in Boston, before Felicity’s suicide, he’d always been a social, fun-loving guy. He’d made new friends in Portland and begun to date again. Not seriously, of course—Felicity’s death had cured him of any impulse to get serious—but he’d learned to enjoy himself once more. And then Melissa had become a volunteer at the clinic.

Their friendship had evolved. She’d been wary at first, and had quickly made it clear she wouldn’t be one of his conquests. Relationships that involved sex or romance, he’d noticed, scared the devil out of her. She certainly didn’t want a dalliance—which was all he was prepared to offer.

So their acquaintance had taken a different route. They’d respected each other’s differences and limitations and boundaries, and gradually, without any intent, they’d developed the unlikeliest of friendships.

No, they didn’t tell each other everything. But sometimes they didn’t have to. Sometimes they just understood each other.

And sometimes, he suspected, they just kept secrets—from the world and themselves and each other.

SIX O’CLOCK ARRIVED before he could finish his work. It always did. He needed an assistant, but the clinic couldn’t afford one, so he made do with occasional volunteer help. This month they were short on volunteers.

Barbara Purcell, the large, attractive, forty-five-year-old black woman who served as the clinic’s nurse practitioner, walked into the room and snatched the papers from his hands. “That’s it. It’s closing time, boy. I’m hungry, Melissa’s hungry and that perky little college-girl receptionist is hungry.” She tapped the papers on the desktop to straighten them, then laid them down on a corner of the surface. Just out of his reach.