Diane Davidson - The Grilling Season

“So is Patricia McCracken depressed, too?” I asked Amy. “About losing her baby?”

Amy lifted her eyebrows. “Wouldn’t you be?”

“Depressed enough to get really angry with Suz Craig?”

“Who knows? Suz distressed a lot of people.”

“Including you.” When she gave a single nod, I swallowed, then said, “Why’d she fire you?”

Amy smiled placidly. “Is that what Suz said, that she fired me? No. That’s what she always said when people couldn’t get along with her… that she fired them, as if they were the incompetent ones.” She shook her head gently. “I quit ACHMO. My payout from the pension plan helped buy this shop.”

“Why’d you quit?”

“Why’d you divorce Dr. Korman?”

“Because he abused me.”

“Aha! Same here. Only Suz Craig didn’t abuse people physically. She beat them up mentally.” Amy said it as if it were a disease. “When I left, I thought, now why did that take me so long?”

“Meaning… . ?”

She frowned and pondered my question. For a long minute she was silent. Then she answered, “AstuteCare has been in Colorado for eight years. I was with them from the beginning, moved up to Medical Management. There was a group of department heads, including Brandon Yuille and Chris Corey, who also lived in Aspen Meadow. We worked as a team. Suz joined ACHMO two years ago. It was the beginning of hell.”

Hell. Interesting. “Why? What did she do to change things?”

“We used to have a weekly meeting to discuss problems we were having. What we needed in the new Provider Relations Manual, that kind of thing. Suz would scream and yell. ‘What’s the matter with you people?’ was her favorite. And then she’d viciously attack every person in the room for being stupid, lazy, incompetent. Or, in the case of Chris, fat. ‘How’s a tub of lard supposed to set a model for health?’ Suz used to yell at him. You get the idea. Brandon Yuille’s father, who’d just lost his wife, was remodeling and reopening the pastry shop. Suz was on Brandon’s case constantly about being there on the weekends instead of working overtime for her. She claimed Brandon came in too tired to be of any use, because he was up all night babysitting his father, on and on. It was none of her business that 1 Brandon’s father was a widower and alone and desperately needed his company. But she mode it her business. She made his life miserable.”

Aha, more hell. “Wasn’t there anybody you could complain to?”

She shrugged. “It was coming to that. A group of them was trying to go over her head.”

“And did they? And to whom?”

“They talked about it. But I’d had enough. Her cruelty was unbearable. I couldn’t stand it anymore. The last – no, let’s see, the next-to-last – straw for me came about five months ago when I was negotiating to buy this store. I saw the store as a long-term project for my retirement. Originally I was planning just to have it open on the weekends, until I could build up the clientele over about a ten-or fifteen-year period, when I retired from ACHMO. But Suz never wanted you to be in charge of your own destiny. She wanted to be in charge of your destiny.”

“She knew you wanted to open this store?”

Amy smiled sadly. “Suz made it her business to know personal details about the people who worked for her.” She shook her head. “Anyway. One of the ACHMO doctors had a gambling problem. Suz asked me – privately, mind you – to follow the guy to the casinos in Central City, see what he was up to, and try to talk to him. See if he’d go into some kind of self-help group, therapy, whatever. If I did, she said, she promised to co-sign one of my loan applications. I didn’t feel good about it” – she shrugged – “but if one of our providers had an addiction that would negatively affect the care he gave, I believed I should help find that out. So, I agreed to follow him.

“So you don’t gamble?”

She laughed softly. “No. I followed this provider of ours to Central City and found him playing slots. I watched him for two hours, then confronted him. He convinced me to dance with the one-armed bandit for a while so I could see how much fun it was. I dropped eighteen dollars in quarters into two slot machines and never made more than a dollar.

Then I convinced this guy-a pediatrician, if you can believe it-to have some coffee, to talk to me. Over coffee he said he wasn’t going to quit gambling. I was wasting my time. Suz got rid of that doctor and now he’s in Utah, leading rock-climbing expeditions. Different kind of gamble, I guess. Then Suz spread it around that had the gambling problem. At that time people were bidding for this store space and I was working feverishly on loan applications. Because I hadn’t succeeded in rehabilitating the pediatrician, Suz refused to co-sign for me, and I didn’t get my loan. When I confronted her about trying to destroy all my plans for the future – to destroy me – she claimed I was paranoid.”

“And so you quit.” Amy looked away for a moment. Then she said, “Well, not just then. You know how it is with institutions you’re involved with. Institution of marriage, institution of the job, institution of the church. At first you’re doing work you love and everybody’s nice. Then maybe the work gets boring but you like the people so much you don’t want to leave. Then some of the good people leave and you think, well, it’s not as good as it used to be but it’s better than going out there looking for something new.”

I looked over at Macguire, who was perusing a magazine on nudist colonies.

“Pretty soon,” Amy went on, “there are only a handful of people you like, or a handful of things you like, about the institution. Then bad things begin to happen. In our case at ACHMO, we got Suz Craig, a female vice-president we didn’t like. She came in and made us all miserable. And although we got a great deal of camaraderie out of talking about her behind her back, it was scant comfort.”

“I still don’t understand why someone didn’t complain.”

She sighed. “There was talk of it, but you know, who was going to bell the cat? Human Resources? Brandon Yuille is so terrified of losing his job that he wouldn’t even join in on our gossip. Poor guy, he had enough to deal with with his mother dying.”

“Was she covered by ACHMO?”

“Don’t know,” Amy replied. “Brandon talks a blue streak about food and always brought us goodies, but about his personal life he was extremely-closemouthed.”

“How about Chris Corey? Did he hate Suz Craig, too?”

“We all hated her, Goldy. She tormented Chris for being overweight and for being late on his deadlines. She used to say that this wasn’t a waiting room where he could be an hour late for all his appointments. And so on and so on. She was cruel and spiteful and manipulative. Plus she was ruining the HMO with the way she was handling cases like Patricia’s. She wanted us to find din on the people suing, without realizing how that kind of activity could backfire. An HMO can’t survive bad publicity. People just won’t sign on.”

“So if you didn’t leave when she refused to cosign your loan, why did you finally leave?”

“You know, I never could figure out if Suz wanted me to leave or wanted me to stay. If she wanted me to leave, why didn’t she just let me buy my store? If she wanted me to stay, why did she threaten to use the gambling issue in a way that would hurt me? I’m telling you, the woman was just mean.” She sighed. “The very last straw for me was when we had a team meeting and in front of all my colleagues, Suz told me I was over the hill, didn’t know the first thing about healing people. She even said I didn’t dress like a professional.”

I couldn’t help it. I eyed Amy’s shapeless, spangled dress - that-could - double - as - a - nightgown. She laughed.