“Bess just got you trained,” she explained, certain the veteran of thirty-plus years in Maple Mountain’s medical trenches felt she had done just that. “Now you’re leaving and a new doctor is coming in for her to deal with. She just got used to working with me, and I’m leaving, too.” Sympathy for the woman softened her voice. “Everything is changing for her.”
“Change isn’t always a bad thing, Jenny.”
“It is when you’ve had too much of it.”
His glance caught hers. “I hadn’t considered that,” he conceded and, still preoccupied with work, looked back to the cabinet. Taking out a pack of batteries, he peeled out two fresh ones for his calculator. “I guess all we can do for her is make the transition as smooth as we can.”
He offered the conclusion as a simple matter of fact. What was done was done. You simply moved on from there.
He wasn’t a person who looked back. Jenny knew that. She also knew that when faced with the past, he did his best to ignore it. At the moment she was more concerned with the fact that there were a lot of things neither one of them had considered—such as how getting married would alter their relationship.
Keeping that uneasy thought to herself, she simply agreed with his conclusion, then returned to closing up the clinic while he headed for his office.
Their relationship had definitely changed. Jenny felt it as surely as she did the reserve that had hung in the air between them ever since they’d left their reception the other night. The only time she didn’t notice that subtle distance was at the clinic. There the demands of the patients and the routine allowed a sense of familiarity that made working with him nearly as effortless as it had always been. Because their roles were so well-defined at the office, she felt comfortable with him. She knew what to do, how to act around him. And almost always there were other people around.
The problem was at his house. Without the buffers, the routine, the defined roles, she had no idea what he required of her. Or, if he required anything at all.
The one thing she knew he hadn’t expected of her was that she cook for him. He’d told her that the day after their impromptu reception, after he’d returned from helping Charlie again.
He’d already told her she didn’t have to clean. He wouldn’t accept rent. Unable to imagine how she would ever feel comfortable living with him if she didn’t contribute somehow, she’d told him she would be cooking for herself anyway, that it was as easy to cook for two as for one, and that it made absolutely no sense to mess up the kitchen twice. Since he’d used pretty much the same argument on her the morning he’d fixed her toast, he hadn’t had much else to say.
With at least that much settled, she had gone to the house after work the past few nights, prepared dinner and left his half in the oven to keep warm while he stayed to finish his dictation and she started working on pumpkin costumes.
Had he brought up the matter of his father’s estate, she might have worked on that, too. With all he’d done for her, she felt desperate to contribute something more substantial to their arrangement than preparing meals, but she didn’t want to push where his father’s assets were concerned. From what Greg had told her, it had been clear that the senior Reid had valued his wealth more than he ever had any relationship, including his own son’s. Aware of the mental abuse that estate represented to Greg, and suspecting how he’d rankled whenever Elizabeth or his attorney brought it up, she knew he needed to come to her with it in his own time.
By the end of the week, however, he hadn’t even mentioned it. A couple of evenings into the next, she was beginning to wondered if he’d decided not to accept her help with the matter. She knew it was on his mind, though. He’d had that familiar edge about him the past couple of days, and a restlessness she’d come to recognize as a need to escape thoughts he would much rather avoid.
The front door opened and closed.
From where she stood at the maple table in the dining room, she glanced up from unpinning pattern pieces for the second pumpkin costume to see Greg in the entryway. Thinking his jaw looked locked tight enough to shatter teeth, she watched him shrug out of his causal tan jacket and hang it over the coat closet’s knob.
He didn’t turn from the closet, though. Cupping his hand to the back of his neck, he lowered his head and drew a breath that stretched the fabric of his blue oxford shirt tight across his broad shoulders. For several long moments, he just stood there threatening the seams of his shirt before he rotated his head as if to work the knots from his neck. When he finally turned around, he looked no less edgy than he had when he’d first walked in.
“Your dinner is in the oven,” she said as he entered the living room. “Do you want me to get it for you? Or would like a glass of wine first?” They had the bottle Dora had given them as a wedding present. She wouldn’t share it with him because of the baby. But there was no reason he couldn’t enjoy it. “You look like you could use one.”
Still rubbing his neck, he continued through the room, turning at the end of the sofa to pass the dining table. “It’s been a long day.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
She offered a smile. He didn’t seem to notice. Obviously preferring to wait on himself as he always did, he said, “I’ll get it,” and disappeared into the kitchen
She heard a cabinet open and close. Then, a drawer. The sounds weren’t unusually loud, but there was a sharpness to them that spoke of impatience, irritation or both.
She knew Larry Cohen, his attorney, had called. Twice, actually. She had dutifully taken the messages asking Greg to return the calls ASAP and left them with his other messages on his desk.
With her back to the doorway, she returned to unpinning tissue from bright-orange felt. “Do you want to talk about it?” she ventured, hoping he would confide in her. If he would just share his thoughts, some of his restiveness might ease.
She wondered if he had any idea how unsettling his tension could be. At the clinic he managed to mask the worst of it. Here, he obviously didn’t feel the need.
“Not really.”’
Hope died. “Okay.”
She hated this. She hated that he was closing her out when it seemed that all he had to do was give her the papers in his bottom drawer and let her help him get his past behind him once and for all. But she had the feeling there was even more going on with him than he’d confided in her, and she wasn’t going to be one of those who pushed him. All that would do was cause him to avoid her the way he was avoiding his attorney. When he didn’t want to deal with something, he simply…didn’t.
The movements in the kitchen stopped. Feeling the fine hairs on the back of her neck prickle, she glanced around to see him watching her from the kitchen doorway. He held a bottle of cabernet in one hand, a corkscrew in the other.
She didn’t know if he realized he was being unfair, or if he’d changed his mind about talking. Either way, he looked positively forbidding as he frowned at her mouth.
“I need to call Larry.”
Pulling the two straight pins he’d noticed from between her lips, Jenny poked them into the red-fabric tomato Claire had loaned her. If it hadn’t been for the wall of tension surrounding him, she might have felt relieved that he’d finally brought up the matter. As it was, all she felt was caution.
“I know.”
“It’s apparently worth around five million.” A muscle in his jaw jumped, his expression grim with the thought of being forced to deal with what should have never been his responsibility. “I just want to be rid of it.”
She knew that, too. “Have you thought of where you want it to go?”
His terse, “No,” was as flat as the green-felt leaf on the table. All he could think about was that the estate had to be liquidated first. That was what he didn’t want to deal with, getting from point A to point B. Getting rid of it would be the easy part. But before he could do that, he would have to deal with the real estate, stocks, bonds, boats, cars and jewelry his father had personally se
lected. “All I know is giving it to charity is a good idea. Anonymously, if possible.”
He sounded as if he knew his father would have hated that. The wealth he had so cherished would simply…disappear.
“Anonymously certainly would be possible,” she told him, willing to encourage him any way she could. “You just use untraceable paper. Something like a cashier’s check,” she explained, having assisted at the brokerage with the investment of such donations. “Once you liquidate, you can have your attorney turn the funds over to you that way. One check. Several smaller ones. No one would have to know who you give them to.”
Not by a twitch did his expression change.
“Would you consider using it here?” she quietly asked.
She still thought that if he could find a cause he believed in, he could focus on that rather than all the dark emotions that had him so blocked now. She was also dying to run an idea by him that had occurred to her sitting with Mrs. McNeff in her hospital room.
He shook his head, his dark hair falling over his wide brow as he walked past her and set the bottle on an empty spot between two pieces of orange fabric.
“That wouldn’t even make a dent in the money. I’ll be glad to send Bess a check to get a new computer and printer. The clinic in Brayborough could use those, too,” he added, already thinking about needs he could fill there. “But that would only take twenty or thirty thousand dollars.”
“I was thinking a little bigger than that.”
He jammed the corkscrew in the cork. “If you’re talking about getting more sophisticated medical equipment, the problem there is that putting money into expensive diagnostics doesn’t make sense. In a community this small, the machines would be unused most of the time. And that’s even if you could find trained technicians to run them when they were needed.”
“What about something that doesn’t already exist? What about something that could be used both places?” she asked, because she’d been thinking ahead, too. “And everywhere in between?”
The furrows in his forehead deepened. “Such as?”
A hint of her old enthusiasm bubbled in her chest. Afraid to sound as if she were pushing the idea on him, especially as resistant as he was being, she shoved it down.
“I asked Bess about all the medical crises the clinic hasn’t been able to handle over the years. I told her Mrs. McNeff had mentioned a few,” she explained, so he’d know how she’d brought up the subject. “Mrs. McNeff also talked about how hard it is sometimes to get to St. Johnsbury in winter even for scheduled treatments. There have to be people like her in remote places for hundreds of miles around here. Bess said not having quick access to a trauma center or treatments is just something people who live in rural areas accept. But maybe you could help them get where they need to be that much quicker.”
The quality of his frown shifted at the light in her eyes. “So what are you thinking?”
“That you could fund an air rescue program. I did some research and found out that some smaller cities in the middle of the state contract with companies that have the capability to airlift patients from one hospital to another. Maybe your fund could contract with them to expand to St. Johnsbury. They could fly out of there and be here in half an hour instead of an hour and a half. I didn’t know what kind of money you were talking about, but now that I do, another option would be to purchase a helicopter outright and lease it to a company and contract for their pilots. There would be insurance and administrative costs, but the services could always be free to the patients who need it. The project could even grow to serve all of rural New England.”
For a moment Greg said nothing. He just stood watching the light in her eyes transform her face and wishing he could feel even a trace of her enthusiasm.
“So, for emergencies like heart attacks and the kind we ran into at the quarry, it would be a rural air rescue,” he concluded, pulling the cork from the wine bottle. “For people like Mrs. McNeff who need critical treatments, it could double as a medical shuttle service.”
“Exactly.”
Something about the appealing brightness in her eyes seemed to loosen the knots in his stomach. “Who would administer the fund?”
“I know you’d want nothing to do with it, so maybe after you liquidate the estate, you could have your attorney turn the whole thing over to the hospital, and their board of trustees could handle it.”
He’d thought before that there was no way on God’s green earth that he could feel anything even remotely redeeming about the wealth his father had used like a leash to control those around him. The connotations with it were all overwhelmingly negative, and even with Jenny’s assertion that putting a positive spin on it would help, he had seriously doubted anything could change his mind or his heart about what he’d felt.
He liked what she’d suggested, though. The need for such a service was definitely there.
He just hated that his father was still jerking with him from the grave. He had to handle the man’s estate, whether he liked the idea or not. The responsibility was one he didn’t want, should never have had. But he’d never turned his back on a responsibility in his life. Never had he allowed anyone else to solve his problems. And he’d certainly never relinquished control over any of his personal affairs. There was something threatening about handing over control in any form. It meant failure to cope on his own, to measure up, to handle the pressure, the responsibility.
The more he’d thought about bringing the papers in his bottom drawer home to Jenny, the less he’d been able to get past the feeling that he would be doing just that. Handing over control and failing to make it on his own.
“Will you think about it?” he heard her ask.
She was talking about a rescue fund. “Yeah,” he murmured, picking up the bottle to go find a glass and his supper. The idea really was a good one. “I will.”
The relief Jenny felt that Greg had finally at least spoken about the estate didn’t last. As one day moved into another, he said nothing else about the rescue fund or the estate. When they were alone, conversation touched only on the necessary, the inconsequential and the baby.
Talking about the baby seemed to relieve the caution that underscored their hours alone. Sharing her dreams for her child, talking about how she would teach her to ride a bike and sew and play T-ball felt safe, too. Far safer than thinking about how awkward she felt having him put a roof over her head when he still wasn’t allowing her to repay him in any substantial way—or how he wouldn’t be around to coach those games or hold that bike himself
By the time her child was old enough for those things, she and Greg would have gone their separate ways.
She didn’t want to let herself think that far ahead. She didn’t want to think about how hard it would be on her baby to leave the only father he or she would have known when that time came. She’d had to make a choice to do what was best for her child now. There would be plenty of time later to deal with the consequences of that decision.
She just wished she had someone to talk to about her concerns, her fears, and the lingering sense of loneliness that had yet to go away. But she had no one. The one person she would have talked to before was the very one she couldn’t talk to now. Greg was part of the reason that loneliness had become more acute.
The night she had accepted his offer to marry, she had felt so protected when he’d held her. There were even moments now when it felt as if he were sheltering her, watching out for her. Elusive moments when he would take care of something he knew needed to be done, as when he’d enlisted Charlie’s aid and boarded up the house. Or when he would ask how she felt, if the queasiness was better or worse. If she was resting better.
She knew in those moments of thoughtfulness that it was possible for the void to be filled. But it had almost been easier to get from one day to the next before he’d teased her with the comfort of his arms because he hadn’t offered them again. As for the void, if not for thoughts of her child, that hole in her soul migh
t have felt even bigger than it already did.
Taking a deep breath, she tried to shake her disquieting thoughts. They seemed to hit at the strangest times, waking her from sleep, catching her in the middle of doing ordinary tasks. Just now, they had caught her doing the only task she’d been able to wrest from him.
She stood by the sink, her hand on her stomach, where it had protectively settled moments ago. In the minutes before Greg had come home, she had changed into a sweater and jeans and headed straight to the kitchen to put on water for pasta. It was Tuesday, and he and Amos were scheduled to “play checkers” in a little over an hour.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, walking in to see her hand at the waist-length hem of her white sweater.
She gave a dismissing shake of her head. “I was…just thinking.”
“When you look that concerned, you’re usually doing more than that.” His narrowed glance slid down her torso. “Are you worried about the baby?”
Her hand returned to her stomach. There was no reason he had to know the exact nature of her worry. Any one of her myriad concerns would do. Especially since there were things about her child she had no problem discussing with him at all.
“I keep waiting, but I haven’t felt it move yet.”
Greg felt a smile threaten as he rolled up the cuffs on his chambray shirt. The woman looking up at him with her lovely blue eyes struck him as an impossible blend of sophistication, cautious cynicism and childlike innocence. When it came to running the office, she was as sharp and savvy as any woman he’d ever met. When it came to anything personal, however, she seemed infinitely more vulnerable.
When it came to her child, she seemed most vulnerable of all.
“For one thing,” he said, stopping in front of her, “you’re only eleven weeks pregnant. You won’t feel movement for at least another five or six.
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