Mary Brady - He Calls Her Doc

Sally snort-laughed again and Lizzy looked up at her. “This is St. Adelbert, honey. It took them a year to decide to plant flowers around the flagpole in the town square. Give them time.”

“I just feel sort of blindsided. I came here because I knew there would be no one when Doc Avery left. It’s not as if I’m an outsider. They know me. Most of them know my family. Was I some kind of moron when I was a child?”

“No, but you were cute.” Sally hugged the child on her lap. Laughter played in her big wide-set eyes.

“Cute? Who wants a cute doctor?” Maude stirred her coffee.

“Barry Farmington.”

“Oh, please. He doesn’t count. He’d hit on a lamppost if he thought he could get some.” Maude sipped coffee, put it down and stirred again.

“They’ll come around,” Sally assured her.

“What do I do in the meantime? I’m used to working sixteen hours a day.” Maude tapped her fingertips on the tabletop until Sally reached over and quieted the tapping by covering Maude’s hand with her own.

“Since it won’t last long, take some time for yourself. Drive to Kalispell and have a massage. Go out and make new friends. Eat dirt. What do you feel like doing?”

“I don’t know. Yesterday, when a patient came in as an emergency, someone must have called Doc Avery. He stopped in…on his way out of town.”

“Cora and Ethel. Know everything. Blab all.” Sally smoothed the hair back from her daughter’s forehead. Lizzy snuggled closer into her mother’s bosom.

“You heard.” Maude crossed and uncrossed her legs.

Sally nodded. “I was behind the cornflakes this morning.”

Maude put her face in her hands.

“It’s early.” Sally patted her on the head and played with her hair the way she did her daughter’s. “Besides, they asked you to come and take over.”

Maude laughed and looked up. “I didn’t tell you what they said the first time I called, when I was just starting my Rural Medicine fellowship. It’s too embarrassing.”

“How about…‘Oh, Maudie, you’re too cute to be our doctor’?”

“Close. ‘We’re sure we’ll find someone before you’re ready.’ I know I heard the head of the selection committee cringe when she said it, too, hoping I wasn’t going to beg for crumbs or anything. That was two years ago and I was already board certified in internal medicine.”

“The jerks, but like I said…”

“I know. It’s early.” Maude sat up and pulled her shoulders back, and then slumped forward onto her elbows. “Maybe I’ll go to Fiji and then come back next spring to see if ‘little Maudie’ is better than no doctor at all.”

“Yeah, go. And while you’re there, you can choose another profession, maybe something that doesn’t take any backbone.”

As if to emphasize Sally’s point, Barney put his paws on Maude’s lap and stretched up to lick her face. “Thank you. I needed that,” she said to Sally and Barney. She scratched the back of the dog’s head.

“See the patients that come. Treat them like kings and queens, and give away ice-cream cones. They’ll come back.”

“Possibly. Where are the rest of the kids?” Maude reached out and touched the silken cheek of the girl in her friend’s lap and got a shy smile as a reward.

“The twins are having a nap—early, but I take what I can get. The older two are on a playdate, so I have peace and quiet—just what you’re shunning. Remember this day. You’ll rue it if you waste it. Now tell me what else has you going.”

“Going?”

“You’re twitchy and I know all this maudlin—” she paused to cover Lizzy’s ears “—crap is a cover-up for what you don’t want to talk about.”

“I am not—” Maude gestured with her spoon “—twitchy.”

“You stirred your black coffee. Twice. The only time you get that twitchy is when—Oh, yes.” Sally threw a fist in the air. “Lizzy honey, Mommy wants you to take that pack of Oreos we just bought and go watch television.”

Maude dropped her coffee spoon on the table with a clatter. She eyed her friend suspiciously as Lizzy hopped down, sprinted for the cupboard and, hardly stopping, turned and ran to the family room holding her prize with both hands, blond curls flying, sparkling stars dancing wildly.

“A whole pack of cookies and television?”

“Who is he?”

“No. No. No.” Maude held her hands up. “It’s not what you think. He isn’t anyone.”

“Better and better. You usually fall for the somebodies who treat you badly and send you back crying to me.”

“I don’t cry. Besides, I like to think I dump them. I’m a busy doctor, remember. No time for such dalliances. Love ’em and leave ’em.”

“Let’s see. It’s not Curly or Jimmy Martin. Who else did you see yesterday? Um. Oh, yes, Jake, but he’s not your type. He’s the right age and heaven knows good looking.”

“Hey, Jake Hancock’s an idea.” Maude knew where Sally was heading, and she didn’t want to go there.

“Is not. He’s too cowboy for you. Besides, if you’d have thought so, you’d have jumped his bones when your parents tried to set you up with him a couple years ago, after they moved off the ranch.”

“And they had nothing left to do but meddle in their daughter’s life,” Maude finished for her.

Sally tapped her chin. “There’s a man out at your ranch running Mountain High. It must be him.”

“It isn’t and never has been my ranch.”

“Oh, you are dodging on this one. He was in town a couple of times before you got here. I hear he’s hunky.”

“Sally, he’s Henry’s brother,” Maude said.

“The doctor? From Chicago?” Sally folded her arms over her chest and wrinkled her brow. “We don’t like him, do we?”

“I’m trying not to hate him.” Maude let a flash of pain for her lost friend Henry grip her.

“Just give me ten minutes with the man.”

Maude laughed imagining five-foot-nothing Sally taking on Guy Daley. She’d do it, too.

“What’s he doing on your ranch, anyway?”

Maude started to reply, but Sally waved her off. “I know you don’t own it, but you should.”

“Because I grew up there?”

Sally nodded emphatically.

“The truth is—” Maude paused.

“What? What have you been hiding from me?”

Maude put her chin down toward her chest and then confessed, “I could have had it.”

“The ranch!”

She nodded. “If I had wanted to be in debt until I was a hundred and ninety-three. The bank said as an M.D. and as a prospective long-standing member of the community we could work something out.”

“So that’s not it.”

“No, it’s not. I just couldn’t imagine working that hard for something…” Maude let her voice trail off. She didn’t know if she could say the words even to Sally. She barely said them to herself. She put her hands down on the table and rested her chin on them.

“Something?” Sally prodded in a gentle tone.

When Maude said nothing, Sally poked her on the arm. When Maude still didn’t respond, Sally poked harder.

“Ouch.” Maude rubbed her arm that really didn’t hurt.

Sally had squared her shoulders and made herself look like Atlas ready to shoulder the world.

Maude chuckled. “Yeah, you don’t have any worries of your own.”

Sally relaxed against the slat-back chair. “Well, there is the new worry I have about Lizzy hurling Oreos all over the carpet in front of the TV because she’s no doubt sitting too close, catching as much electromagnetic radiation as she can.”

“Maybe we should go rescue her.”

“Lizzy, sit on the couch and watch TV,” Sally called over the sound of Big Bird. Then she looked at Maude and smiled. “I can always flip the couch cushion over. Now what’s up with the ranch and how much does it have to do with one Daley brother or the other?”