Single Mom's Protector - Complete Series

by Nella Tyler

  “Then we’ll do oatmeal-chocolate chip, how does that sound? And maybe if we get permission you can take some with you to school to share with the other kids.”

  “That could be fun,” Landon said from the back seat. I turned my attention onto the road in front of me, asking Landon to go through his vocabulary words for the week to review them while we made our way to the office; it was called Kid Care Pediatric Physical Therapy, and I kept my eyes peeled to see the sign for it.

  Chapter Three - Mackenzie

  It was almost the end of the day, and I was ready to leave; I had to wait to make sure my last patient either became a no-show (if they were more than fifteen minutes late) or came in after all. It was a new patient—a little boy by the name of Landon Willis, who according to his chart had suffered a severe fracture two months before during an indoor soccer game. It was a pretty straightforward case; mostly I would be helping the little boy regain the range of motion and rebuild the muscle he lost while the bone was healing, and make sure that there weren’t any long-term problems with his mobility. Fortunately he had just missed shattering the growth plate at the top of the bone—so he hadn’t had to have surgery.

  “Girl, what are you sitting around for?” I looked up from the computer where I was reviewing the case to see Amie leaning against the counter a few feet away. I shrugged.

  “My four-thirty isn’t here yet,” I said, glancing at the time quickly. It was 4:32, and in another thirteen minutes I could consider the patient a no-show. I could—in theory—make a run to the coffee shop a block down from the building and maybe pick up some treats for the other people in the office before making an early start on my Christmas shopping.

  “Which one is that?” Amie came to the desk and peered at my screen. “Landon Willis, five years old.” I scrolled down to let her see the x-ray on the file, sent to the office by the child’s primary. “Oof, that is a tough fracture! Just missed the growth plate.”

  “He’s lucky,” I said, nodding as I looked over the X-ray again. “He’s been cleared for PT, and his father is supposed to be bringing him in for eval today.” I shrugged, dismissing the file for the moment.

  “Probably one of those helicopter parents,” Amie suggested. “Parents constantly trucking the kid to this or that or the other thing.” Between the two of us—and the other therapists and therapy assistants—we’d seen it all: kids whose parents were too busy for them, who just dropped them off at the office and picked them up and signed paperwork without even looking at it, kids who’d been born with birth defects like spina bifida or hemiplegia or something else, whose parents thought their children were made of glass. I’d chosen to work with kids because they were so resilient; when I’d done my rotations, I’d worked with all kinds of people needing physical therapy, from elderly patients to athletes to kids to regular adults suffering from the long-lasting effects of an injury. Athletes were almost as much fun as kids—they were used to the ache of working out, and usually they were interested in the process of recovery—but I couldn’t stand the fact that I would have had to regularly tell people in the prime of their lives that they would have to change their careers completely. Kids, even when we couldn’t bring them back up to what they’d been able to do before their injuries, were more adaptable.

  “It’s a five-times-per-week schedule,” I told Amie, crossing my arms over my chest. I’d worn a thick thermal shirt under my scrubs, but even still I’d definitely need to change before I left the office; it was too cold outside, colder than it had been when I left my apartment that morning. “If he can’t even make it to the eval session on time…”

  I heard the bells at the door ringing and stood up quickly to see who was coming in. Most of the other therapists were working with patients in the therapy area, and the assistants were doing paperwork. I saw a tall, broad-shouldered man with brown hair, clean-shaven and wearing a tailored suit. In his arms he carried a young boy; the little boy was maybe five years old, with big blue eyes and dark hair, paler skin than his father but the same curve to his lips. The man had a pair of child-size crutches tucked under his arm, dangling behind him as he hurried to the desk.

  “I’m so sorry,” I heard him say quickly to the office manager. “We’ve got an appointment for 4:30. I tried to make it on time, but traffic was just terrible.”

  “Name please?” I slunk back away from view to let Alice handle the man.

  “Willis—it should be Landon Willis,” I heard the man say. Amie grinned at me.

  “No luck for you, huh?” she wandered off to the break area further back in the office, leaving me to get myself together for the appointment. It irritated me that the guy was late for his son’s first session—a lot of parents thought that the evaluation was really just a formality, and when they started out with that attitude, they were almost always chronically late, which mean that I ended up having to supervise two patients at the same time at least four or five times a day.

  I gathered up the charts I would need for my evaluation of little Landon, and waited for Alice to call me up to let me know that it was time to bring the boy back and start the process. The phone on my desk rang and I picked it up quickly. “Yes?”

  “Landon Willis is here,” Alice told me. “He’s checked in, his insurance is verified.”

  “I’ll come get him then,” I said, managing as much enthusiasm as I could. I put the phone back in the cradle and strode towards the door between the clinic and the waiting room, where Landon and his father sat waiting. When I stepped through, holding the door open, I saw that Landon had reclaimed his crutches and was bouncing them on the floor by the rubberized bottoms. “Landon?” I looked at the little boy and he stopped what he was doing, looking up and giving me the most evaluating look I’d ever seen from a kid.

  “We’re up, bud,” the man said, standing quickly. He looked at me uncertainly. “Should I carry him back or…” I shook my head.

  “Let’s let Landon use his crutches for this,” I suggested, holding the door open for them to come back. “We want to get him back to normal as quickly as possible.”

  The two came through the door and I led them towards the clinic area, trying to decide how I felt. Landon looked to me like the kind of boy who would run off the second he got the chance—the kind of kid who needed extra supervision during his sessions to make sure he didn’t overdo it. Probably gets that trait from good old Dad, I thought as I stopped at the first station I needed to use for the evaluation. Landon’s dad—the file said his name was Patrick—was actually pretty good-looking, once I got over my irritation with him for being late; as Landon monkeyed around on his crutches impatiently, Patrick watched his son carefully.

  “Okay,” I said, setting the chart down and taking up a blood pressure cuff. “This is probably going to mostly be pretty boring for you Landon, but I need to make sure I know where you are in terms of your health right now, and how well you can do things like balance and stand straight and all those other things.”

  “He’s a very healthy kid,” Patrick told me. I steeled myself for him to start complaining as I got Landon to sit down in a chair so I could get a good pressure reading.

  “Sometimes injuries can throw things all around,” I said, fastening the cuff around Landon’s arm. “Having to change habits, and not being as active, things like that…we just want to have a good baseline for your son’s health before we get started on working with him.” I glanced at Patrick and saw him nodding his approval. Well, that’s a surprise, I thought. I started the general health evaluation, taking down Landon’s blood pressure, pulse, and taking him through the different tests for respiratory capacity and everything else we needed to know. I was glad to see that he wasn’t incredibly fidgety—I had been dreading, at the end of my day, having to keep a five-year-old on task while we went through what was admittedly a boring process.

  “You’re doing great, buddy,” Patrick told his son, taking the chair I pointed out to him while we started on the functionality te
sts.

  “This one is going to see how your balance is,” I told Landon; as always I almost completely ignored his father except when I had to explain to him the rationale behind what I was doing, or ask him for help in positioning his son. I took Landon through the different tests: checking his balance, checking his coordination, and his flexibility. He chattered all the time, asking me about anything that popped into his mind; I let him—after all, as long as he was making the movements and focusing enough to not risk hurting himself, I was happy.

  “How long did you have to go to school to learn to be a therapist?”

  “I had to go for years,” I told Landon.

  “It’s very difficult to study for,” Landon’s father informed his son. “They have to go to school and get a special degree, and then they have to work with patients, and take tests.”

  “So you must be really smart, Ms. Mackenzie.”

  I laughed.

  “I like to think so! Do me a favor, Landon and step up onto this platform—just the one leg. I want to see how you move. If you need help or if something hurts, let me know, okay?” Landon nodded.

  “Do you have a husband? Or kids?”

  I blushed at the question—it was common enough that I thought I would eventually stop blushing at it, but it was too close to my parents’ concern for my love life for comfort.

  “Nope,” I said, smiling at Landon and not looking at his father at all. “I love to work with kids, but I haven’t found anyone I want to get married to yet, so no kids for me.”

  “Do you want to get married some day?”

  I nodded. “I think it’d be nice if I found someone,” I told Landon.

  “Do you live with your mom and dad?”

  “Nope—I live right here in the city, on my own.” I grinned at Landon, patting his back as he stepped down from the platform. “The other leg now, if you would?” Landon nodded and concentrated in the task at hand, lifting his foot to step up onto the platform.

  “Do you get to eat ice cream whenever you want? Dad says I can’t, because I’ll rot my teeth out.”

  “Well Dad is right—if you ate ice cream all the time you’d lose all your teeth,” I said, glancing at Patrick in amusement.

  “Dad also says I can only watch one scary movie a week,” Landon informed me. “Even though I never get scared!”

  “What about that nightmare you had back in June?” Patrick looked at me and grinned slightly—it lightened his face up, made him seem more handsome. I pushed that thought aside.

  “That was just because of something that Pete said,” Landon protested.

  “Whenever I had nightmares, I used to get into bed with my mom and dad,” I told Landon. “And you know—they were always caused by something I ate. I loved watching scary movies as a kid, too.”

  “I get into bed with Dad sometimes,” Landon told me. I knelt down and put the strap of a weight-bearing machine on his ankle. “I don’t have a mom.”

  The matter-of-fact way that he said it made my heart lurch in my chest and I looked over to see how Patrick was taking it.

  “A lot of people don’t have moms,” I told Landon. “Real quick, Landon, see if you can pull that up with just your leg.”

  By the time I’d finished evaluating the little boy, I was exhausted from all the chatter, but pleased. “He has very good general health,” I told Patrick and saw the relief that flooded across his face. “The prognosis is excellent. I think Landon here lucked out with where he broke his leg. It’s going to take some aggressive therapy, but we can get him back up to speed.”

  “Just what I need,” Patrick joked, tousling his son’s hair. “But you’re sure he’ll be able to do everything like normal?”

  “Possibly even better than before, if we go about this right,” I said, smiling to reassure the man. “If you can get him to do some exercises that I’m going to show you in between sessions—but don’t overdo it—he’ll bounce right back from that break in no time.”

  “Whatever we need to do,” Patrick told me. I gave him a few instructions, and then sent the two on their way with the hint that Landon should take a nice, long bath with some Epsom salts in the water before he went to bed. As I watched them leave, I had to admit that even if he’d been late, Patrick was obviously dedicated to his son.

  Chapter Four - Patrick

  “Come on back, Landon and Patrick,” I smiled at Landon’s therapist, following him through the door and into the therapy area. The first appointment I’d met with her, for Landon’s evaluation, it was almost difficult for me to take her seriously until halfway through the session; she was so gorgeous that I couldn’t quite believe that she was actually a real therapist. I could tell too that she didn’t have a really high impression of me—there was a little look on her face when she let us into the back of the clinic that told me that she was just waiting for me to confirm her bad impression.

  Mackenzie reached down and gave Landon’s hair a quick tousle as she led him over to one of the machines. “We’re going to start out with some stretches, okay big guy?” I stood back so that I wouldn’t distract my son, watching him interact with the therapist. She was short—though I hadn’t noticed that at first; her hair was some brown-red color, her skin was as pale as the porcelain plates my wife had gotten for our wedding. She looked too fragile and precious to be able to do the things I’d seen her do with Landon in the first few days of our sessions. Her scrubs made it almost impossible to make out what her shape was like, but I thought privately to myself that it was probably very good indeed, based purely on how strong she was.

  I watched my son get into his exercises with the kind of single-minded focus that he had whenever there was anything physical going on. It was all I could do when I got him home at the end of the night to keep him from trying to jump around and climb the furniture. “I think we might be able to discontinue the crutches after this week,” Mackenzie said, glancing at me from where she was supervising Landon on some kind of pedaling machine. “He should hold onto them in case he feels like he needs them, but the strength is returning really well.”

  “It’s pretty hard to keep him using the crutches anyway,” I told her, sitting down on one of the benches. Around the room, there were kids of all ages working away with other physical therapists, and I silently said a prayer of gratitude for the fact that Landon’s reasons for being in PT were not as serious as some of the cases I’d seen in our first few sessions.

  “They slow me down!” Landon finished his exercise and started to snatch his feet free of the pedals—only to stop, with a look on his face that told me that he remembered almost too late that Mackenzie had scolded him for doing just that two days before.

  “Well, you’d be really slow if you hurt yourself again, don’t you think?” Mackenzie made a face at Landon, the expression dissolving into a grin. “There are these things called tendons, here in the backs of your knees,” she explained to him, reaching down and brushing her fingers on the area. “They help your knees bend and move. If you try and start running around like normal with your muscles weak, then it puts strain on the tendons and ligaments that hold everything together—and if you hurt those, it hurts a lot. So better to listen to your body, don’t you think?”

  “But my body wants me to run!” Landon squirmed, giggling into Mackenzie’s face. She laughed, shaking her head.

  “I don’t think it does,” she said, keeping her tone firm even as she grinned. I tried to keep from laughing myself. “Your brain wants you to run because I bet you get bored easily, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Landon agreed.

  “Do you do psychotherapy too?” Mackenzie glanced at me and shrugged, the smile still curving her lips.

  “But we really want to make sure that your leg is up for it before we let you just run like crazy. If you tear something in your knee because your muscles can’t hold you up properly, you might not be able to even walk for a long time.” Mackenzie gave my son a quick, serious look. “I think you’d ha
te that.”

  “And that kind of injury hurts a lot,” I added, giving Landon a look of my own. I remembered Landon’s injury and a shudder worked through me; I’d broken my share of bones as a kid, playing hockey and lacrosse, and I knew how much it hurt. I’d also torn my Achilles tendon—and it was hard for me to say which injury had actually hurt the most.

  “But the good news is that I think you can start walking short distances on your own,” Mackenzie told Landon, guiding him from one machine to another. “I’ll still want you to use your crutches when you’re in school, and you should be really careful when you’re playing, but if you’re just going to the bathroom at night, or from the living room to bed, you can do that without the crutches.”

  “Okay!”

  I smiled to myself and continued watching as Mackenzie worked with my son, keeping him on task and entertained, distracting him from the inevitable pain that came along with getting his muscles back into shape. Even after only a few sessions, I was able to see a difference in the way that Landon moved around. He was starting to feel more comfortable—and he was definitely sleeping sounder.

  I’d asked Mackenzie about it after the second or third session; Landon was full of energy right when we got home but within about an hour he would be near to falling asleep on the couch, right over his dinner plate. “You may want to see about putting more protein in his lunch,” she’d suggested. “He’s building muscle, which takes fuel. After the first week he’ll mostly be back to normal, but you’ll be able to speed his recovery up with really, really good nutrition.”

  As if she’d read my mind, Mackenzie asked what Landon had had for lunch that day. “I had a tuna sandwich, an apple, carrots, and some pudding,” Landon told her. “Oh! And dad packed me almond butter too. It was the chocolate kind. I had that during recess though.” Mackenzie grinned, including me in her smile, and I shrugged, feeling proud of myself.