From House Calls To Husband

by Christine Flynn

  And she’d adored him for it.

  Katie touched the cap covering the lens, her thoughts caught in the twenty-year gap between then and now. By the end of that summer, she and Mike had discovered a few of the more obscure star groupings and both had become thoroughly hooked on what the night sky contained. Amazingly, that interest had held despite a disparity in ages that, at that time in their lives, should have left them with nothing in common at all. But that single thread bound them in a comfortable friendship as talk of stars expanded to talk of galaxies and the universe and, ultimately, as they grew older, to their places in it. They never talked of such things anymore—of their dreams, their hopes. They hadn’t for a very long time. But the bond remained. For her, anyway.

  “Ready?”

  Katie turned with a start, nearly spilling her wine. She caught the drip that ran over the rim with her finger. “Sure. Is everything all right?”

  “I don’t have to leave, if that’s what you mean. The resident can handle it.”

  She watched his eyes follow her hand as she touched the tip of her finger to her lips. Her movement was natural, completely unconscious. At least, she hadn’t been conscious of it until she realized it had drawn his glance to her mouth, and that he wasn’t looking away. Even as she lowered her hand, his focus stayed right where it was.

  The odd intensity in his eyes caused her heart to bump her ribs, but he was already shifting his attention to the telescope.

  “What are you doing?”

  She shook her head, shaking off the strange yearning sensation that had come out of nowhere. “Just wondering if you ever use this anymore. I can’t remember the last time I looked through one.”

  “I can’t, either. I don’t even know why I keep it.”

  A soft smile touched her mouth as she shrugged. “Maybe it reminds you of a simpler time.”

  He got that look again. The same one that had turned his eyes so serious when he’d alluded to how much he trusted her. “Maybe,” he said, forcing a smile himself. “Life was pretty uncomplicated back then. Come on. I don’t want to keep you here until midnight.”

  Mike kept her in his office until midnight anyway. But that was only because after they’d finished working, she’d asked if Paul, his youngest brother, had made it back to Southern Oregon State all right. Paul had been home for winter break. That inquiry had led to questions about the rest of his family, which led Mike to mention the mountain cabin his other brother, Tom, wanted Mike to buy with him. He’d told her he was considering going in on the cabin, mostly because he knew Tom and his family would use it and raising three kids on social workers’ salaries, Tom and his wife couldn’t afford it on their own. Then, Katie had reminded him that he’d once wanted a cabin surrounded by pine trees himself, and he’d warmed to the idea even more.

  He liked that about Katie; that she could sometimes make him see things he’d overlooked. Or forgotten. She was a good friend, good company. And there were times lately when he really hated to see her go. He just wished she’d lay off him about furnishing the house.

  He’d walked her to the door. Now, having waited on the porch until she’d driven off, he headed back inside. The day had been a long one and he automatically turned off lights as he worked his way down the hall to his bedroom. He was tired. His body demanded sleep. But his mind wouldn’t shut off. Even after he’d stripped to his briefs, brushed his teeth and pulled back the hunter green comforter on his king-size bed to crawl between the sheets, he could still hear the echo of Katie’s quiet concern.

  You’d be more comfortable. You’d be happier.

  What made her think he wasn’t? he wondered, punching his pillow into a ball. He was happy. Downright blissful, damn it. And why shouldn’t he be? He was doing the work he loved. He was building his practice and his skills, and he had a roof over his head. Just because there wasn’t much under that roof didn’t matter to him. The only reason he’d bought the place to begin with was because he’d needed more room, and this particular house had a great view of the woods.

  Katie was right. He had always wanted to live surrounded by pines. But just because she was right about that, didn’t mean she was right about anything else.

  Marla would have hated the place.

  The thought of his ex-wife had him whipping the sheets back and dragging his hand down his face. He knew better than to attempt sleep when his mind was revved. He was better off doing something—anything—until his thoughts settled enough to keep him from fighting the blankets all night.

  He reached for one of the medical journals piled by his bed, only to toss it back and get up. Had there been a break in the rain, he’d have wandered out to the telescope to see if the clouds had parted enough for him to lose himself in the vastness of space. But he could still hear water dripping from the eaves. So he headed for the kitchen to nuke a mug of milk. There were some remedies modern medicine still couldn’t beat without side effects.

  Minutes later, mug in hand, he was standing on the thick carpet in his bare living room. With the interior lights off and the exterior security lights on, he could see rain puddled on the deck outside the window. Raindrops landed in the puddles, causing the water to shimmer and dance.

  Katie was right. He did need a chair. On nights like this, he could sit and watch the rain. Maybe when his drug study was finished, he’d use that freed-up time to do something about the house. He’d been so busy getting his professional feet under him that he hadn’t taken time for anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary. He hadn’t had a spare minute, it seemed, since he’d finished his residency eighteen months ago. That was when he’d been invited to join the partnership in Honeygrove, and when his marriage had started falling apart.

  He hadn’t even seen the end coming. But then, he hadn’t been looking for problems, and Marla had hidden her agenda well. As beautiful as she was patient, he’d been drawn by her easy smile and seemingly undemanding manner. She’d been enormously understanding of the long hours he’d had to put in as a resident. Being a pharmaceutical rep, she’d been away from home a lot herself. They’d both looked forward to having his residency behind them, to her cutting back on her hours, to building their future. Then, with the move to Honeygrove, Marla’s true colors had slowly begun to surface.

  They’d agreed that the little apartment they’d moved into was temporary; that a house was a priority. They moved in one day and he had to start work the next, taking over most of a caseload from a retiring partner. Marla didn’t go back to work at all. Instead of just cutting back, she quit her job completely and promptly started shopping for an architect to design them a house on a golf course. Her rationale for giving up her job had been that she wouldn’t have time to work and oversee the details of having his home built. She’d also said she knew he’d be busy getting himself established, so she’d manage everything for both of them. She also needed to volunteer on the right civic and charitable committees to enhance his standing in the community, and that would take her time, too. Then, there were the hours she needed to spend at the gym and the salon staying beautiful for him.

  He didn’t want his standing “enhanced.” He didn’t want to live on a golf course. He didn’t want a trophy wife. Most of all, he didn’t want his life “managed” by a woman who didn’t care about him so much as she did being the wife of a “rich” doctor. She’d wanted the right house, the right car, membership in the right clubs, the right clothes. She’d said she was entitled to it all, because she’d spent the two years of their marriage supporting him. Emotionally, anyway. His parents had paid for his schooling, and he and Marla had paid their living expenses equally, so it wasn’t as if she could claim any financial obligation on his part. To add insult to injury, she hadn’t wanted to start their family as they’d planned, either.

  It had taken two months from the time they’d moved to Honeygrove for all her little plans to come out, two months for him to realize that, from the day they’d married, she’d simply been biding her time.


  He turned from the window, from the ghostlike reflection of himself. He didn’t know why he was thinking of this tonight. When the divorce had become final last spring, he’d felt relief more than anything else. He hadn’t felt any bitterness or pain, either, which had left him wondering if he’d ever loved her at all. It had made him wonder, too, if he really wanted the wife and the kids and the dog. Maybe he didn’t need the comforts of a home. As he stood watching the rain, the steam from his mug fogging a streak on the window, he wondered if maybe that was why he didn’t care that his house echoed when he walked through it.

  The thought settled like a hollow weight in his gut. He didn’t like the empty feeling at all. So, he did what he always did when he needed to disassociate himself from something that held the potential to cause discomfort, or to hurt. He pulled back from it, mentally blocking the sensation by focusing objectively on the matter at hand. And, objectively, he knew he wouldn’t be thinking of any of this if Katie hadn’t originally brought it up. He also knew he needed sleep, and that was his priority at the moment. He was on call for the next five days, so he had to round on all the office’s patients, not just his own. Given that one of his colleagues was out with a cold, it could well be one of those weeks.

  The week started off badly for Katie, and went downhill from there.

  She walked into work the next morning to find the floor short-staffed from a flu bug making the rounds, and every bed filled. There wasn’t any staff to float from other units, either, and only one aide was available through an outside service. The bug had been around for a while, and hospitals as far away as Portland and Medford were using up all the temporary help.

  The whims of fate being truly perverse, while everyone was running around doing double duty, a staff meeting was called for the next afternoon to explain that the computer program was being changed—just as the old new one had finally got up and running. But administration wasn’t the only area being unreasonable. Her patients seemed more demanding than usual, too. So did their relatives. Which meant that Katie, who was fighting off a sore throat herself, had to utilize all her skills as psychologist, facilitator and counselor.

  As the week went on, stress levels rose. Patience was tested. Dr. Aniston was his usual charming self, which didn’t help matters at all, and the nurses, especially the temporaries they did manage to get, balked continually at having to collect extra data each time they administered Mike’s study drug when they were barely able to keep up as it was. Rather than having a year’s worth of Mike’s work skewed, Katie collected most of it herself. On top of that she had a flat tire on the way home from work Wednesday night. On Thursday, her throat was worse and she wound up on an antibiotic so she wouldn’t pass anything on to her patients. And Saturday morning, already late because she’d overslept, the hot water handle on her shower broke.

  I can do this. Katie repeated the phrase to herself so many times that week that she began to think of it as her personal mantra. She could handle it all simply because it wasn’t acceptable to admit that she couldn’t. She would cut corners where her own needs were concerned, but she refused to shortchange anyone else. If anyone was counting on her for anything, she would be there.

  That was why she didn’t call in sick when no one would have blamed her for doing just that. And it was why she dragged herself to her shift at the free clinic when what she really wanted to do was crawl into bed and sleep for a week. She wasn’t a martyr. Far from it. It was just that the thought of letting someone down was anathema to her. She wasn’t the only nurse at Honeygrove Memorial who was pulling double shifts when she didn’t feel all that great. And the clinic operated with only one nurse and one nurse practitioner or doctor each shift. If she didn’t show up when she was scheduled, that left one person to handle an entire evening’s worth of indigent patients alone. She knew exactly what it was like to expect someone to be there and not have them show. She knew, too, what it was like to make plans, to count on someone, then have to deal with the inconvenience or the disappointment because one person didn’t do what he’d said he would. She simply wouldn’t do that to anyone.

  Still, the thought crept into her mind every evening that she really wouldn’t mind coming home to someone who would put his strong, supportive arms around her while she talked out her frustrations. Or they talked out his. Or they just held each other while nothing was said at all. But she had no one like that, had no prospect of anyone like that, and the last thing she needed was to dwell on what she lacked.

  What she did have were friends. Terrific ones. And it would have helped enormously if she’d been able to unload on them. Not on Mike, however. Aside from the fact that he’d been pressed for time himself the past several days, being a guy, he wouldn’t have understood the need for a pair of strong, capable, protective arms to curl up in. Her girlfriends would have certainly related, though. Especially Dana and Lee. Dana Rowan and Lee Murphy, both signers of the now infamous I-will-never-marry-a-doctor pact, were like sisters. The three of them had known each other since ninth grade and, being similarly unattached, would have offered the proper amounts of understanding, sympathy and commiseration. Both worked little more than a stone’s throw away. Dana was a surgical nurse. Lee was a nurse practitioner in the outpatient clinic.

  With all three of them working in the same building, large and sprawling as it was, it should have been easy for them to get together. It rarely worked that way. Katie couldn’t even get away for lunch until the following Monday, and then she had to cancel at the last minute because one of her patients wasn’t doing well. She learned from a quick call down to Dana that Lee had canceled, too. The doctor Lee worked for was being his usual impossible self and she couldn’t get away, either.

  Hours later, reminding herself to try again tomorrow, Katie let herself into her duplex after working her sixth, twelve-hour day in a row. Within five minutes, she’d given Spike his obligatory cuddle, while the fifteen pounds of vibrating fur checked her pockets for treats, traded scrubs for sweats, washed off her makeup and pulled her hair into a ponytail. She was just preparing to see what dietary delight awaited her in her freezer when she remembered the kitty litter and cat food she’d picked up on her way home and left in her car.

  Thinking she might as well get it before Spike started getting vocal about being fed, she opened the door to slip out. The cat was right behind her. In a split second, he was between her feet and darting for the twenty-foot pine tree ten feet away.

  “Spike! No!” she hollered, and watched him disappear up the trunk.

  She couldn’t get him down. She coaxed. She cajoled. She tried bribing him with cat food and tuna and a leaf from the fern he loved to destroy when she wasn’t around. He didn’t budge. He simply sat clinging to a three-inch branch fifteen feet up with his tail wrapped around the orange and black spots on his little white body and a look of abject terror in his eyes. He was a house cat, pure and simple. He might have developed a sudden yen for the great outdoors, but once he got there, he was petrified.

  Tired, running out of patience, she coaxed some more. She begged. She told him she was going to wring his furry little neck.

  Nothing worked. And the more she tried, the more she realized her throat was tightening up and her eyes were beginning to sting. It was fatigue, she knew. It simply had to be fatigue that was making her stand shivering in the dark wanting to cry because she couldn’t get her cat to come to her.

  She already knew she couldn’t climb the tree herself. She’d tried it the last time the little monster had done this and she’d nearly broken her neck. The couple who lived next door to her were sweethearts, but they were pushing seventy and in no position to offer help. What she needed was a ladder. A big ladder. And the only person she could think to call was Mike.

  Chapter Three

  “You’re lucky you caught me. Two more minutes and I’d have been out the door.”

  “You weren’t on your way to the hospital, were you?”

  �
�Dinner.”

  “Oh, Mike. I’m sorry.”

  Muscles shifting under his sweater and jacket, Mike told her not to worry about it and lifted the extension ladder from the ski rack on his black sedan. As anxious as she’d sounded on the phone, he hadn’t had the heart to tell her he was already running late. “I begged an extra half an hour. I figured that would give me time for a rescue on my way to the restaurant.”

  He considered it a fair indication of how concerned she was about her cat that she had no comeback for his faint sarcasm. As she hurried beside him, her breath a puff of vapor in the cool night air, she carried her worry in her eyes. At work, she couched her concerns with professional calm. When it came to friends and family—which she considered her cat to be—she wore every emotion on her sleeve.

  “I really appreciate this,” she murmured, casting a troubled glance toward the top of the pine. “I really do. I just didn’t know who else to call.”

  “Ever consider the fire department? That’s who most people call when their schizophrenic pet gets stuck in a high place.”

  The look she spared him was laced with tolerance. “Spike’s not schizophrenic. He’s just a little...hyper. And I couldn’t call the fire department,” she informed him ever so reasonably. “Not looking like this.”

  In the merging pools of light from her porch, her carport and the streetlamp on the corner, he watched her push back a long, soft-looking curl that had escaped the tangle of hair anchored atop her head.

  “What does how you look have to do with anything?”

  “Are you kidding?” Incredulity washed fatigue and worry from her face. “I don’t have a scrap of makeup on. My hair’s a mess. And nobody but Spike sees me in these sweats.” Tugging on the stretched-out neckline of her faded gray sweatshirt, she pulled it back over her shoulder. “Some of those guys are major hunks. What if the man of my dreams was one of them? I’d be mortified if he saw me looking this awful.”