Paradise Cove

by Jenny Holiday

“Dr. Walsh…”

  Nora had asked the other women to call her Dr. Walsh in front of patients but encouraged first names in private. Something was clearly wrong. “What is it?”

  “Mike got laid off.”

  Oh no. “I’m so sorry. Do you want some extra hours?” It would be tight, but she could probably afford ten extra hours a week, come up with a make-work project.

  “No. I actually, uh…want fewer hours. Like, ideally no hours.”

  Huh? Also: Shit. Nora and Wynd might never be best friends, but Wynd did a good job keeping the clinic running.

  “I know I just started. I’m so sorry. But Mike’s situation is the universe whispering to us about our next step.”

  “Are you sure? Because if it’s whispering, you might be hearing it incorrectly.”

  “Well, we had a big chat about it, and I swear to goddess, later that night we had a knock on our door from a Realtor who said he had clients in Toronto looking to pay cash for a place in Moonflower Bay, and were we interested in selling? So we’re going to do it. We sourced a used RV, and we’re going to move to the farm property and trust the process. If we work hard and we’re lucky, we’ll be hosting alpaca retreats by this time next year.”

  “Well, congratulations,” Nora said weakly. She couldn’t crap on someone’s dream.

  “I know it’s a lot sooner than we planned, but sometimes that’s the way things happen. When the universe gives you what you want, are you going to complain that it’s too early?”

  “No?” Though she didn’t see why not. Didn’t they say that timing was everything?

  “No,” Wynd said decisively. “Sometimes you just have to trust the universe.” She patted Nora’s arm. “Anyway, I wanted to talk to you today because I need my two weeks’ notice to start now. We’re moving this weekend, but I’ll commute in for the next two weeks. Unless you can find someone sooner?” she added hopefully.

  Nora sighed. She had to go jab teenagers now. Maybe one of them would be about to graduate and hear the universe whispering, “Become a medical receptionist.”

  She sighed again. Well, she could jab teenagers and contemplate her dilemma.

  Sadly, this was a problem Jake couldn’t bail her out of.

  Speaking of Jake…“Hey, can you slow down?” Nora asked Amber, who was driving the Mermaid Monstrosity. “That’s my dog!”

  She rolled the window down as well as she could—it was manual and refused to budge after about the halfway mark—as Amber pulled up next to Jake. He had just come out of Jenna’s and was bending over to feed something to Mick.

  “Are you giving him treats?”

  He looked up, surprised. “Doc.” Then sheepish. “Guilty.”

  “Jake’s keeping me in business.” Jenna had emerged from the store with a piece of chalk to update her sandwich board with the day’s new funny saying.

  “He’s supposed to be on a diet!” Nora protested, but she couldn’t help smiling. Overall, Mick’s time under Jake’s care had slimmed him down considerably.

  She hadn’t told Amber yet about Wynd, but suddenly she really wanted to tell Jake, even though she’d just been thinking that this was a problem he couldn’t solve. Sometimes it felt like she and Jake had ESP. Wynd just quit, and I’m freaking out about it.

  It didn’t work. “He really likes those bacon–peanut butter things,” Jake said.

  “Who wouldn’t like a bacon–peanut butter thing?” Maya appeared on the scene—she lived in the apartment above Jenna’s. “Hi, Nora! Are you on the move?”

  “I am! Headed to the high school for a flu-shot clinic. You want to come?”

  She wasn’t sure why she was asking. Maya wasn’t going to add any medical expertise, but she was really fun to be around, and Nora, still reeling from Wynd’s news, could use the distraction.

  “Sure!” She opened the passenger-side door. “Scooch over, though, cause I’m not riding in back.”

  The van had an old-school bench seat up front, so against her better judgment—the seat belt in the middle was only a lap belt—Nora scooted over.

  “Sorry, Jake, no room!” Maya trilled, and they were off.

  Though he would never admit it to anyone, Jake could kind of see the appeal of having a cell phone. If, for example, you knew someone who was running her first out-of-town flu-shot clinic and you had a cell phone, you could text that person and ask how it was going. You could ask that person to send you pictures.

  If you were the kind of person who wanted to see pictures of flu-shot clinics.

  For God’s sake.

  It was midmorning. He and Sawyer didn’t have any active jobs. He and Mick had already been walking for an hour.

  It was a beautiful day.

  It was not a Tuesday. But what the hell. He wasn’t even sure what he was going to do. He had basically bequeathed his traps to a guy who fished out of Port Frederick. But maybe he could get out his tackle and just…fish? Like, for fun? When was the last time he’d done that?

  Half an hour later, he was waiting for Dennis to lift the bridge to let a bigger sailboat in front of him pass. Mick was perched on the stern of his trawler, a squat little mascot.

  Twenty minutes after that, he’d dropped anchor in a spot about three miles north of the cove. He was using an ancient rod and lure, ones he’d had as a kid. Once he’d come on board with his dad, pleasure fishing had fallen out of his life. But he’d held on to all the stuff, because, like his dad had done with both Jake and his brother, he had planned on taking Jude out.

  He never had gotten Jude his own rod, though. They’d never made it into London for that shopping trip.

  The feeling of casting was both familiar and foreign. Muscle memory kicked in, and within an hour he’d hauled in a dozen pickerel. He threw back most of them but kept a handful.

  At a certain point he decided he’d had enough and sat back and stared at the horizon.

  His boy was in this lake.

  He and Kerrie had agreed on that, easily and immediately, even though everything else between them at that point had been fraught. They’d gone out in this very boat with no particular destination in mind. He had driven. Told her to let him know when she felt like they were in a good spot. She had nodded, so he knew she’d heard him, but she hadn’t said anything, not for an hour. So he’d just kept going. It felt like they’d reached the middle of the damn lake by the time she signaled him to stop, though he knew with his rational mind that they had not even come close.

  The weird thing was, they hadn’t said anything. He’d racked his brain, trying to come up with words appropriate to the situation, but he kept coming up blank. She had been silent, too, but that was more unusual for her, the lawyer who always knew what to say. Maybe she had gone blank the same way he had. Or maybe she’d had lots to say but had been holding it in. Regardless, he hadn’t asked her, and now it was too late.

  But she’d held his hand as he’d held the urn out over the gray water. It had reminded him of the wishing flowers. A macabre, inverted version of the town tradition. Except there were no wishes here. Kerrie had wished for Jude, and Jude had come. But then he had gone.

  He observed with mild interest that he was thinking about all this without losing his shit. More often than not when he went out on his Tuesday expeditions, he ended up doubled over and gasping for breath, and it was a toss-up whether he would stay out long enough to get anything to sell on the pier.

  For some reason, today, he was able to look at the endless expanse of water and imagine Jude in a different way. He used to think of Jude buried beneath it, trying to get out. Like Nora’s zombies, maybe. It was a nightmarish scenario, made no less so for its irrationality. He had told Nora, way back in her early days in town, that he’d stopped wanting to go out on the boat after Jude was gone. That was why. The waves so often came for him out here.

  But suddenly, damned if he couldn’t look at the lake and think of Jude with a sort of neutrality. Well, no, that wasn’t right. Not neutrality. Definitely sa
dness. But not the doubled-over, hyperventilating despair from before.

  It occurred to him that another reason to have a cell phone was that if you wanted to ask your ex-wife if she was silent the day you scattered your son’s ashes because she didn’t know what to say or because she felt like she couldn’t say what she wanted to say, it would be easier to do that in a text than in a phone call.

  When Nora got home from the high school, the Mermaid’s cocktail hour was underway. The thrice-weekly event was, on paper, for guests staying at the inn, and they did attend, but so did some of the downtown denizens of Moonflower Bay. Nora spotted Maya and Pearl off in a corner, huddled over a phone.

  “They’re passing judgment on each other’s Tinder matches,” Eve said, reading Nora’s mind.

  “That’s…actually kind of awesome,” Nora said, smiling affectionately at her friend. Well, friends. Nora and Maya had slid easily into a close friendship, but Nora realized to her slight surprise that she genuinely thought of Pearl as a friend, too, despite her constant need to censor herself around Pearl lest the woman make an entire life plan for Nora.

  “How was the flu clinic?” Eve asked.

  “It was great. I jabbed seventy-seven kids and twelve teachers, and the principal is going to do some flyers for kids to take home about their parents potentially needing the MMR booster.”

  “Good for you!”

  “Yeah, look at me. I’ve turned into a regular vaccine crusader,” Nora joked.

  Eve didn’t laugh. “I’m serious. You’ve been here what? Four months? And you’re really moving the needle on all these public-health challenges. And that’s all in addition to actually being the town doctor! And by the way, Sawyer was saying that all his officers have been singing your praises on the naloxone question.”

  Aww. Nora was a little embarrassed by the praise but also by how happy it made her. She’d had her head down, working so much and so methodically that she’d never really stopped to consider her impact on the town.

  A guest approached Eve. “Excuse me. I’ve been admiring that print.” She pointed at a reproduction of a painting of a mermaid lurking in the water as she stared at a bunch of humans on a boat. “May I ask where you got it?”

  Eve turned to Nora, murmured, “Excuse me,” and led the guest to the painting. “It was my great-aunt’s, but I have a similar one in the dining room that’s by an artist in Bayshore—she has a studio there that’s open to the public on weekends.”

  Nora had been listening to Eve, so she was surprised by Jake’s stealthy arrival on her other side. Jake had never, to her knowledge, attended cocktail hour at the Mermaid before. She was happy to see him, even though seeing him made her remember the ESP conversation she’d tried to have with him earlier. Which made her remember her receptionist problem. Which took the shine right off the I’m-a-public-health-genius feeling she’d been enjoying.

  “How did the clinic go?”

  “Wynd and her husband are moving to the countryside and she just gave her two weeks’ notice and I’m freaking out.”

  He blinked a few times—she had kind of ambushed him there. “Let’s go see Mick, shall we? He’s in the kitchen.”

  “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  He paused, in both walking and speaking. “I thought you might want to see Mick.”

  Right. She did want to see Mick. “Should we take him for a walk?”

  Winter had been late coming to Moonflower Bay. They hadn’t had any snow, but the cold temperatures had arrived. Everybody said the lake moderated the winter here, made it less cold than it would be inland, but the dampness got into Nora’s bones. She combatted it by wearing a ridiculous amount of winter outerwear—an ankle-length down parka, a wool hat, and mittens so big she had trouble with the leash.

  Which Jake took from her with a laugh. “Maybe you should have done your life reset in Florida.”

  “Nah. I love it here.” She started booking it down the sidewalk. “But we gotta walk fast, or we’ll die.”

  “You love it here?”

  He sounded surprised. She’d surprised herself. It had just popped out of her mouth. But it was true in that way that things said before you could think too hard about them often were. The lake, the quirky locals who had become her friends—even the meddling, blue-haired, septuagenarian gaming champs. The sense that she was making a difference. All that stuff had sneaked up on her.

  They’d turned toward the lake when they left the Mermaid. “I mean, what’s not to love about this?” She gestured ahead of them, at the little beach in the distance, as she picked up the pace even more. He followed her across the sand and onto the pier. When she reached the end of it, she rested her elbows on the railing and heaved a huge sigh.

  “Okay, so Wynd quit,” he said.

  “Yeah, her husband got laid off, so they’re moving to the country and starting their hippie commune.”

  “I thought it was an alpaca farm.” Nora had told Jake about Wynd and her quirks.

  “Potato-potahto.” She sighed again. She sure was doing a lot of that today. Someone should give her a medal. “I mean, I get it. This is her dream. But…her dream wasn’t supposed to arrive so soon.”

  He chuckled. “I don’t think that’s how it works.”

  “That’s what she said.” She tilted her head back and looked at the sky and ordered herself not to sigh again. To her utter mortification, hot tears started spilling out of her eyes. She was overreacting. But she couldn’t seem to stop. “I was just starting to hit my stride with the clinic,” she said, feeling the need to explain the uncharacteristic outburst. Also, my grandma is dying. She didn’t need a psych consult to figure out that the tears were probably as much about that as about anything.

  “Hey, now. Hey.” Jake hunched down and leaned over the railing so he was in her line of vision.

  She looked away from him. If he said, “Don’t cry,” she was going to punch him.

  He maneuvered himself some more so he was back in her line of sight. “It’s a setback, but we’ll figure it out.”

  “I have a full day of appointments Monday.”

  “Did Wynd not even give notice?” He sounded gratifyingly peeved.

  “She did. Two weeks.”

  “Okay, so you have two weeks to replace her. Piece of cake.”

  “Yeah, but unless I hire an unemployed loser, the new person will have to give notice at an existing job. Ugh, maybe I should just close the clinic early for the holidays and go to Toronto and be with my grandma.” She’d been planning to close between Christmas and New Year’s anyway, but that was still a couple weeks off.

  “Is that what you want to do? Close up shop now?”

  Was it? No. She couldn’t do that to her town. “No. I don’t want the clinic to close for longer than the holiday break we were already planning on. I have to figure out a way to stay open until then.”

  “Okay, then, that’s what we’ll do.”

  “‘We’?”

  “I’ll help you.”

  Ah, Jake. He was used to solving problems, but this wasn’t a problem that could be fixed with power tools and a can-do attitude. “What are you going to do? Answer my phones? I thought you weren’t a phone guy.”

  He shrugged. “I’m rethinking that.”

  “And forget the phones, Wynd really is the only one who has truly conquered our stupidly complex scheduling software.”

  “I’ll handle it.”

  She didn’t want to make him feel bad, so she didn’t say anything, but if Jake wasn’t a phone guy, he definitely wasn’t a software guy. But her face must have conveyed her skepticism, because he said, “Do you trust me?”

  “Yes,” she said automatically. Of course she did. He’d fixed her house, and then when her house proved uninhabitable, he’d found her another one. He had seen her at her most vulnerable, crying over her grandma and fighting with Rufus, and he was still here.

  “Then let me handle this. Go to Toronto for the weekend. Hang out with
your grandma, and I’ll see you Monday morning at the clinic.”

  “But—”

  “You wanna take Mick with you or leave him here?”

  “You can’t just—”

  “I’ll keep him, then. One less thing for you to worry about.” He started the backward-walking thing.

  “Jake!”

  “Nora.” He kept retreating.

  “If you—”

  “Be careful on the roads. You should leave soon, take advantage of the last of the light.”

  And with that, he turned his back and jogged off with her dog trotting along beside him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  She’s coming!”

  Jake chuckled as Amber stepped away from the window at the front of the clinic. Everyone was acting like they were throwing a surprise party.

  And honestly, they might as well have been, given the size of the crowd that greeted Nora early Monday morning when she stepped through the front door, her eyes wide. He tamped down a smile. She was completely bundled up in a parka with the hood up and a scarf wrapped around her neck and covering the bottom half of her face.

  “How’s your grandma, dear?” Pearl was the first to intercept Nora. “Did she like the pastry cutter I sent?”

  “She did, thank you,” Nora said, her eyes darting around until she found Jake’s. The effect was comical, given that her eyes were the only part of her face visible. “She had me make and roll out some dough just so she could cut it up, in fact.” She shot him a look that was very clearly a What the hell, Jake? look, even though he could only see a small slice of her face.

  He shrugged. Everyone else would fill her in.

  “You know,” Eiko said, “no one told me that your grandmother was a famous surgeon. If I’d known, I might have written about it in the paper.”

  “But she doesn’t live here,” Nora said.

  “I know, hon—Dr. Hon—but you do. Second-generation medical genius comes to town—that would have been a great angle. I still might do it. Do you have any pictures of the two of you together?”