“I think I’ll have to take a rain check, Gretch. Mother can’t be left alone right now and—”
“I understand. Maybe next trip.” Then Gretchen winked. “And if you spend your time now with Jake, maybe he’ll get you to move back for good and then we can pick up where we left off all those years ago!”
Again Ally merely nodded and smiled, thinking that nothing and no one would ever get her back to Chicago for good.
Gretchen gave her another hug and then left Ally to finally wash her hands.
As she did, she couldn’t help thinking about what her old friend had said, particularly about the woman Jake had been involved with. It obviously hadn’t occurred to Gretchen that some of her description of that other woman—the woman who had been wrong for him—applied to Ally.
No, she wasn’t someone who huffed or puffed or tapped her feet to show her displeasure. But she was definitely all about her career. So far, for her, that’s what came first and she couldn’t picture it being demoted.
Which meant that she was wrong for Jake, too.
Not that she’d thought she was right for him. Or thought about it at all. Or wanted to be right for him. Of course she was wrong for Jake Fox. So what?
And yet something about the suddenly blatant knowledge of that didn’t sit well with her.
But she did love her work. And her busy, hectic, career-first life in Los Angeles. And she wouldn’t change any part of it.
Although she had to admit that every now and then, when she was facing a long weekend or a holiday or even time between projects, she sometimes didn’t know what to do with herself. She sometimes felt as if she might be leaving a corner of her life too bare…
“Three kids,” she said to her reflection in the mirror over the sink as she dried her hands and smoothed a stray strand of hair into the clip that held it twisted in back. Gretchen had three kids. A whole family. Of her own.
There couldn’t be any long weekends or holidays or downtime that Gretchen didn’t know what she’d do with herself.
And Gretchen had a husband, too. Along with her career—though her career was more of a hobby than an all-consuming ambition.
But still, when Ally compared herself to her friend, she had to wonder if she was missing something. If she really had left a corner of her life too bare.
The image of Jake popped into her head just then. The way ideas did when she was decorating a room—as if he could be the perfect addition to the bare corner. As if he might complete the design.
No, no, no, that couldn’t be!
“I’m not his type,” she said aloud. “And even if I had a type—which I don’t—he wouldn’t be it.”
Not only was he rooted in Chicago, there was also his friendship with her mother. Realistically, it didn’t make sense that someone who had any kind of affinity for Estelle could be the man for Ally. She and Estelle were about as different as any two people could be, so if Jake Fox had anything in common with Estelle, it seemed to follow that he and Ally were not destined to hit it off. That ultimately, the way things began between them would be the rule, not the exception. Even if there had been—last night and today—times when it seemed as if they might be hitting it off.
What she needed to remember, she told herself, was that critical, controlling beginning with him. Because being critical and controlling was Estelle through and through.
“And I have to take that as a warning,” she said firmly.
Okay, yes, maybe there was a corner of her life that needed a little something. But Jake Fox was not that little something. Regardless of what an appealing addition he could make.
“Sorry, Gretchen,” she muttered in regards to her old friend’s wish for her to be persuaded to move back to Chicago because of Jake Fox. “It’s not going to happen.”
And yet there was that melancholy feeling again…
Ally had no idea why or where it had come from.
But she didn’t have time to analyze it.
Because just then she heard her name come over the hospital intercom, calling her to come to the emergency room immediately.
Chapter Five
“This was good news, Mother. Really good news.”
“It’s good news to you that there’s something wrong with me? That I’ll have to take pills the rest of my life?”
“It’s good news that you didn’t have a stroke or an aneurysm. That you don’t have a brain tumor. That you won’t even need to be tested for Alzheimer’s. Compared to those possibilities, a thyroid problem is so much easier to deal with. All you’ll have to do is take a pill and—”
“You know what I think of that—I hate pills! I hate medicine and the side effects and being a slave to it. I’m not living like that!”
Embarrassed, Ally knew several people were staring at them in response to her mother’s voice raised loud enough to be heard by nearby diners.
Ally pretended an interest in some of the worst food she’d ever tasted and let silence fall in hopes that Estelle would calm down if she did.
After Estelle’s initial diagnosis, Jake had arranged for her to have an ultrasound to make sure her thyroid was not tumorous or enlarged or had any apparent disease. When the final conclusion was that it was merely treatably underactive, Jake had insisted on taking the three of them out for a celebration dinner. Estelle had given her opinion about fancy restaurants and overpriced food. She’d insisted they go to a buffet-style eatery where she had a two-for-one coupon and coffee was free to seniors. That was where they were having the discussion that seemed to disturb Jake far less than it did Ally.
“It’s one pill a day for now, Estelle,” he said calmly then. “Let’s deal with that and not worry about anything else.”
“I don’t think I even have this thyroid thing.”
“You do. I read all the reports myself,” he said, not eating his dinner with any more enthusiasm than Ally was. “You have hypothyroidism—that means your thyroid has gotten sluggish. If you take the pill, most of the memory problems and confusion you’ve been having should go away or at least be considerably better. That unexplained weight gain you’ve been mad about will stop. And you’ll be back to your sunny self.”
He said that sarcastically, grinning when he did.
Ally waited for her mother to blast him for the remark.
But rather than exploding—the way her mother would have if Ally had said such a thing—Estelle laughed. “I’ve never been sunny and there’s no pill that’s going to change that.”
“Let’s let it do everything else, though,” he urged as if he was enlisting her in a conspiracy.
Estelle took a bite of her pie and didn’t agree or disagree.
Ally sat back in amazement.
Then Estelle took another tack. “I’m no good remembering to take pills like that—day in and day out. How is it going to help my memory if I can’t remember to take them?”
“What if I get a small alarm clock that will go off at the same time every day?” Ally suggested. “You can keep the prescription bottle with it and when you hear the alarm, you’ll know to take the pill.”
“You want me to have a heart attack? Every day, out of the blue, some alarm blasting me?”
“I can get you something that plays music or has a tone that doesn’t startle—”
Estelle flicked her hand as if she were angrily slapping away a fly.
“We’ll figure something out,” Jake said.
Ally wasn’t sure why, but she had the sense that he had something else along those lines to talk to her about and didn’t want to do it with Estelle there, so she conceded and suspended her attempts to find a solution.
“I suppose you’ll be running back to California now, won’t you, Alice?” Estelle said then, her tone as sharp as a knife, the way it always was when she used Ally’s given name.
“I do need to get back to work before too long, yes,” Ally answered, very conscious of Jake being there for this. “But I’ll make sure things are okay b
efore I do.”
“The grass is dying,” Estelle said then, out of the blue, as if she were challenging Ally.
Estelle had been given a dose of her thyroid medication at the hospital, but Ally was reasonably sure it hadn’t reversed the effects of her condition yet. So she assumed that the abrupt and erratic change of subject was another of Estelle’s mental blips. And since she’d learned that it was easier to just go along with them, she said, “I know the grass was dying. I’ve been watering it since I got here.”
“What about when you’re not here?” Estelle demanded.
“Oh, we are still talking about my leaving.”
“I can’t keep up with things anymore. I’m alone, in case you’ve forgotten—”
“It isn’t something I can ever forget,” Ally said under her breath.
“The yard, the house—it’s all on me. My problem. There’ll be leaves in a few months and then there’ll be snow—last year I got two notices from the mailman threatening not to deliver my mail and to give me a ticket if I didn’t shovel the walks. But when it’s deep I can’t do it, I can’t lift it.”
Listening to her mother, Ally thought that these were surely things that Jake had heard about from Estelle on the morning walks. Things that—since Ally hadn’t been of help with any of them—had contributed to why he’d been so irritated with Ally before he’d even met her.
“I’m sorry,” Ally said. “If you had told me—”
“It’s fine. Never mind,” Estelle snapped.
Ally had never been successful at pleasing or appeasing her mother. She shot a glance at Jake, hoping for guidance, but he only gave a sympathetic shrug of his eyebrows.
Ally looked back at Estelle and said, “I won’t go home until I’ve taken care of everything.”
“I don’t need you to take care of me. Everything’s been mine to do since—”
Ally saw the rage in her mother’s eyes, in her expression, and she knew what Estelle was thinking, what she wanted to say.
But her mother stopped short and said only, “Everything’s been mine to do since you know when. So leave tonight for all I care.”
They were drawing outward stares now.
In a quiet, controlled voice, Ally tried again to calm her mother. “I’ll make arrangements for the lawn, and for the leaves to be raked and hauled away when they fall. I’ll see if I can have the landscaping people do snow removal, and if not, I’ll find someone who will come whenever it snows—”
“And what if the furnace goes out? What about the rain gutters—the leaves get in there, too, you know. They clog them up and then the ceiling leaks! And last year a branch on a tree across the street broke and went right through those people’s roof—what about that? Milka had her husband to turn to. She has a son who came right over. But what would I do? Call you in California?”
It struck Ally then that what her mother was voicing was much like what she’d felt since arriving in Chicago—fear, frustration, being overwhelmed. And she understood that.
“Yes, no matter what happens, you can call me,” she said firmly to get across to Estelle that she meant it.
But it still didn’t ease her mother’s anxiety. “What if you’re in Italy—that’s where you were last week, wasn’t it? How could you fix my roof from there? You couldn’t, that’s how!”
Italy she remembers, Ally thought.
But desperate to quiet her mother, she made a rash decision and said, “You could come and live with me in California, then. We can sell the house. My condominium has three bedrooms, you’d have your own bathroom, the maintenance is all covered, and if something happened while I was away—”
“I was born and raised in Chicago! I’ve lived my whole life here! My friends are here! Everything I know is here! I’m not moving!” Estelle stopped herself and then said, “I think I’ll wait for the two of you in front.”
And out she went.
When Estelle was no longer in sight, Ally glanced at Jake again.
“That was quite a celebration,” he said, clearly as taken aback as Ally.
“Welcome to my world,” Ally muttered. Then, more pointedly, she said, “As a psychiatrist, isn’t it your job to step into situations like this and calm people down or mediate or…something?”
Jake shook his head. “Things need to come out, people have to vent. It would have been better in a closed session rather than in a public place, but—” he shrugged “—she got it off her chest.”
He said that very matter-of-factly, clearly undisturbed by the scene they’d been a part of.
Ally envied him his composure.
She picked up Estelle’s purse from where it had fallen to the floor when her mother had stormed out. When she looked up again she found Jake watching her with compassion in his gray eyes.
“It’s late,” he said then. “It’s been a long, stressful day all the way around. How about if I drop you and Estelle off—I’m sure she’ll want to get to bed—and while you tuck her in, I’ll swing by the liquor store. Then I’ll come around to your place and we can wind down with a glass of wine and talk.”
“I’d like that,” Ally said wearily and maybe a little too eager for what he was offering.
But she was too wrung out to analyze that eagerness. Or to put up any resistance.
“White wine or red—what do you prefer?” he asked.
“At this point, anything with an alcohol content will do.”
Jake glanced at the unappetizing food left on their plates. “Hard to say what should follow this.”
“But we had a coupon,” Ally managed a small joke.
Jake laughed. “Way to look on the bright side!” he teased her.
Surprisingly, it made Ally laugh along with him.
As she did, she thought that lifting her spirits and making her feel better at the worst of times was something he was getting good at.
And it made her realize she was beginning to like this man.
A lot. Perhaps more than she should.
Chapter Six
Ally’s garage apartment was unbearably hot when she finally got upstairs. She, Jake and Estelle left the restaurant, and her mother had gone to bed. So she turned on the ceiling fan and the table fan to cool it off, then waited for Jake on the bottom step of the outdoor staircase that led to it, the corkscrew and wineglasses she’d taken from her mother’s kitchen in hand.
“Has your landlady locked you out for failure to do your duty?” Jake asked in greeting when he came around the house and found her there a few minutes later.
“It’s a good thing her room doesn’t have a window facing back here—if she heard that she might consider it tonight,” Ally answered, joking in return.
She’d been doing some deep breathing of the night air and she finally felt more relaxed than she had in the restaurant. Of course, it didn’t hurt that her mother was out of the picture for the night and that she didn’t have to worry about dealing with more from her until the next day.
It also didn’t hurt that she was getting some quiet time alone with Jake again to finish out a day that would have been completely wretched if not for him.
Ally pointed upward toward her apartment. “My place was sealed tight until about ten minutes ago, so it’s a sauna. I thought maybe we could sit out here instead. There’s a glider—”
“It’s nice right here,” he said, sitting on the step beside her.
The wooden staircase was not wide and sharing one planked step made for close company. Jake’s khaki-clad leg brushed the side of hers and she could smell the faint scent of his cologne.
Not that she even entertained the idea of changing anything. Even if she had convinced herself only hours earlier that he wasn’t her type, he was right—this was nice…
He was carrying a brown paper sack and he set it on the ground between his feet.
“Wine,” he announced as he took a bottle from the bag and handed it to her. “And crackers—just in case you might not have had enough dinner.�
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“I’ll trade you—you open the wine and I’ll open the crackers.”
Jake accepted the deal and as he applied the corkscrew he said, “Did Estelle get to bed all right?”
“Just like nothing had ever happened. I think she might have forgotten everything she screamed about in the restaurant.”
“I don’t know about that,” Jake said, pouring the wine into the glasses Ally held out. “Even if she forgot about the fit she threw, the facts are still the same—nothing she said wasn’t true. She has been having all those problems around here and it is too much for her to handle alone now.”
Ally sighed elaborately. “And I thought you weren’t taking her side.”
“No sides, just the facts. Plus, now there’s medication she’s going to need to take regularly,” Jake reminded. “Things have changed for her, Ally, and she’s scared. She can’t do this alone.”
Ally turned slightly so she could lean against the house’s red brick wall and look at him in the faint glow of the light that was shining down on them from beside her apartment door. “I know that, Jake. But I live in L.A. My business is in L.A. I can do what I said I would in the restaurant, and try to get here more often—maybe even every couple of weeks—but I can’t be here to force-feed her pills every day.”
“There are houses that need decorating in Chicago,” he suggested. But his observation sounded more theoretical than serious so it didn’t push any buttons in her.
“I have to make a living, you know? Celebrities aren’t my only clients. They aren’t even the foundation of my business—they’re the icing on the cake. If I left L.A., I’d have to bake a whole new cake.”
“Would you if you could, though? Let’s say something happened tomorrow that made you able to instantly have a new foundation here. Would you be willing to move?”
Ally thought about it. “I guess I’d consider it, yes. But even if that happened, there are contractual obligations I’ve already made that would take me away, so no matter what, I just can’t be the sole solution.”
Designs on the Doctor Page 6