“Okay,” Jamie said. “I don’t have a thing to eat in the house.”
It was close to six when they left the clinic. “Let’s go in my car,” Nate said. “I’ll bring you back here after.”
Nate drove out of town and up the mountain. “There’s a place up here that’s good,” he said. “The tourists love it.” About ten minutes later, they pulled into a parking lot. A sign, that was lit from underneath, said The Farmhouse Restaurant. They were seated at a table with a red-checked gingham tablecloth and the waitress brought them water in Mason jars.
“We can get beer or wine here,” Nate said. “Nothing stronger. Want something?”
“I’ll have white wine,” Jamie said. Nate ordered a draft beer and glass of chardonnay for Jamie.
“This is an old farmhouse,” Nate explained. “It’s been owned by the same family since the early nineteen hundreds, but this last generation turned it into a restaurant. There are a lot of tourists around, so they decided to cash in on that.”
Jamie looked around and decided she liked it. She looked at the menu.
“I’m going to have a steak,” Nate said. “It’s been a rough week and I’m rewarding myself.”
“I think I’ll have the braised chicken with potatoes and carrots,” Jamie said, folding her menu closed and placing it on the table.
“I know you’ve only been here for a day, but what do you think about our town?” Nate asked.
“Well, as you say, it’s only been a day, but so far I like it. I haven’t worked during regular daytime hours for years, so that’s good.”
“I’m on call twenty-four hours a day,” Nate said. “But most days I get to go home and that’s it. But you never know what might happen after hours.”
“You can always call on me anytime after hours,” she said.
“You’ve got quite a resume for someone so young,” Nate said. “Vanderbilt med school, internship in California, residency in Birmingham. ER doctor in a major Atlanta hospital. Impressive.”
Jamie blushed. She wasn’t used to such forthright compliments. “Thanks,” she said. “Where did you go to med school?” she asked.
“Harvard,” he said.
“That is very impressive,” she said. She took a drink of water from her Mason jar.
“Why are you here in the hills of Tennessee?” she asked. “You could be anywhere you want to be.”
“I am where I want to be,” he said. “I came here twelve years ago on a three-year contract and decided to stay. I want to do something meaningful with my medical degree.”
They ate their meal in silence for a few minutes, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. Jamie savored the second good meal she had eaten in a long time.
“You said you’re from a place near here,” Nate said. “Where is that?”
“I’m from Baker, Tennessee,” she said. “It’s about two hours away. In a valley.”
“I’ve been through there,” Nate said. “On my way to Nashville.”
“You pretty much have to go through there,” she said. She hoped he would stop asking her about Baker.
“So you graduated high school in Baker and then went to Vanderbilt?” he asked.
She didn’t want to think about her graduation.
“Yes,” she said. “I went to Vanderbilt.”
Nate must have sensed something in Jamie’s tone because he stopped asking her about her hometown or her past. They didn’t have much else to talk about, so the clinic became the topic of conversation again.
“We’ve got starving children up in those mountains,” Nate said. “We’ve got meth labs and alcohol stills. The meth labs are fairly new. The stills have been around for two hundred years. It’s the meth labs that worry me.”
“What about the starving children?” she asked. “Do they have any access to food?”
“Yes, there are programs through social agencies and the schools. But it’s a hard life. I try to keep my eye on those kids.”
Jamie suddenly lost her appetite. She didn’t feel right sitting in a nice restaurant eating braised chicken and drinking wine when there were starving children nearby.
“I probably should have waited to tell you all that,” Nate said. “It’s not exactly dinner conversation.”
On the drive back to the clinic, Nate told Jamie where she could buy groceries and where the nearest Wal-Mart was—Athens, a town about twenty-five miles away. “It’s not too far to drive,” Nate said. “I go once every two weeks or so to stock up on groceries and other stuff. They’ve got everything at Wal-Mart,” he said, looking at her and laughing. She laughed too. She supposed if there was a nearby Wal-Mart, she wasn’t too far from civilization.
“Where do you live?” she asked him.
“I live a few houses down from you,” he said. “But I’m looking to get a place back up in the hills. Maybe build a log cabin.”
“You must be planning to stay awhile,” Jamie said.
“Yep, I think I’m going to stay a long while. This is where I belong.”
Jamie wished she knew where she belonged.
The next day was Saturday and the clinic closed at noon. Jamie went straight to the Wal-Mart in Athens. She needed everything. Up and down the aisles she went, putting two sets of double-bed sheets in the cart, along with bath towels and kitchen towels. She bought cleaning supplies before heading over to the grocery section. It had been a long time since Jamie had cooked. There was a time in her life, when she thought she would cook every day with Tommy, using the organic produce he grew. She had learned to cook from her mother, but she had not used those skills in many years. She was going to get back to that.
Wal-Mart had organic vegetables, and Jamie bought potatoes, carrots, celery, onions, cabbage, butternut squash, lettuce, and radishes. The store had a good selection of rice and pasta, and Jamie added brown rice and several types of pasta to her cart. At the meat section, she selected ground beef, pork chops, and boneless chicken breasts. On and on Jamie went, adding whatever appealed to her to the cart. By the time she made it to the checkout counter, her basket was practically overflowing.
For the first time since she had left her childhood home in Baker, Jamie felt like she had a real home. She surveyed her white walls, and decided to paint some of them. Over the next few weeks, she painted her living room a pale golden color and her bedroom a light blue. She wanted the kitchen to be more vibrant, so she painted it a deep apricot. She hung her kitchen towels on hooks and her white bath towels on the towel racks in the green-tile bathroom.
The nurse practitioner, Stacie, asked Jamie to attend a crafts fair with her one weekend, and Jamie started a folk art collection that included primitive paintings, quilts, and ceramic pieces. She and Stacie started attending fairs and festivals almost every Saturday, and Jamie began to collect furniture, both antique and folk pieces.
After attending the festivals, Jamie and Stacie usually cooked dinner at one of their houses. Stacie lived a couple of blocks down the street. It seemed the main clinic personnel all lived within walking distance of each other.
One Saturday afternoon, when Jamie and Stacie were taking a walk down the street, they ran into Nate. The leaves had fallen off the trees and the weather was brisk and cold. After chatting for a few minutes with everyone’s breath visible from their mouths, Jamie asked Nate if he’d like to join them for supper.
“No clinic talk,” Stacie said to Nate, but she laughed. “I know how you are.”
Nate held his palms out. “I promise,” he said, laughing.
When they walked into Jamie’s house, Nate said, “I see you’ve painted.”
“Yes,” Jamie said. “That’s okay, isn’t it? I just needed to see some color.”
“Of course it’s okay,” Nate said. “Whatever makes you want to stay here.”
Jamie went into her blue kitchen and sliced some cheddar cheese and placed the slices on a tray with crackers. Nate came in then. “Can I help you with that?” he asked looking at the tray in her hands
.
“I’ve got it. But you could get the wine out of the fridge and uncork it. Glasses are in the cabinet to the right of the sink.”
She placed the tray on the coffee table and Nate brought out the wine and glasses. He poured the chardonnay into glasses and handed them to Stacie and Jamie.
“I’ve got to get cooking,” Jamie said. “Otherwise, I’ll get too happy with the wine to want to do it.”
She went back into the kitchen and started making beef stew. It was perfect for the cool November night. She cut up the stew meat, floured it lightly, and browned it in a Dutch oven. Then she added beef stock and onions, carrots, and celery. She stirred everything around, then placed it covered in the oven. She would add the potatoes closer to the time when it would be ready; otherwise they would be a mushy mess.
“Nate, you promised!” Stacie was saying when Jamie walked back into her living room.
“I’m sorry,” Nate said. “I guess I can’t help it.”
The trio sat in the living room and ate cheese and crackers and drank wine. Nate uncorked a second bottle as they talked and laughed. They might move onto a third bottle of wine, Jamie thought. But she wasn’t unhappy about that. As they sat there, Jamie realized that she felt contented for the first time since she left Baker. She had a best friend again, her first since Linda. She had a house that she loved and she was able to cook again. She loved her job and she liked Nate. A lot. He was the first man she had met since Tommy who felt a passion about his career, who felt a purpose in his life.
Jamie had not mentioned Tommy to Stacie, and she decided that she might never mention him. It was old news. Tommy was dead and she had continued to live. She wanted to have a life.
Chapter Three
After the bluegrass festival, Jamie continued to see Matthew. He was kind to her and didn’t pry into her past. She appreciated that. She didn’t want to talk about Tommy. But as sweet as Matthew was—and as good looking as he was, because he was that—Jamie knew from the start that the relationship could never go anywhere. Matthew was a sophomore, but he still had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. That was no crime. Jamie couldn’t blame him for that. But where was their relationship going?
After a couple of dates with Matthew, Jamie had become intimate with him. The best she could say about that is that it was adequate. She let her mind wander during their sex and she was able to be satisfied. But not emotionally.
After six months of dating Matthew, Jamie broke it off. She needed an emotional connection. But her behavior over the rest of her college career did not allow that. She started hanging out at a college bar, and looking back, she was ashamed to say that she had picked up quite a few young men. All one-nighters. Sometimes, she would meet someone that reminded her of Tommy—his smile, his hair, his laugh, his voice—and she would give them a try. But they weren’t Tommy, never could be Tommy. They didn’t even know they were supposed to be like Tommy, and Jamie felt sorry for them. She knew they were supposed to be like Tommy, but they had no idea what they were up against—the best man she had ever known.
Jamie was seeking something that wasn’t there. But she kept trying. And she kept failing. By the time she started med school, Jamie was celibate. And she was celibate when she went to Grahamville, years later.
Linda had stayed with Josh through the rest of college and married him a month after they graduated. They moved to Durham, where Josh was from, and she and Jamie gradually lost touch over the years. She wondered now how Linda was doing. Was she still married? She had been pregnant the last time that Jamie had been in touch. Linda had a seven-year-old child and Jamie wasn’t a part of the child’s life or Linda’s life.
And now, Jamie was a doctor in a clinic in a little mountain town in Tennessee. As she had since she became a doctor, she was healing one life at a time, saving one life at a time. But she could never save the one life that she really wanted to save. Tommy’s.
Thanksgiving was approaching and Stacie and Nate and Jamie planned on making a huge feast, complete with turkey and dressing and gravy.
“Won’t you be going home?” Nate had asked her. “I know it’s near here.”
“No,” she said. “I’m going to be staying here.” She didn’t want to tell Nate or Stacie that she hadn’t been home since she left over a dozen years ago. Wouldn’t go home where she would see Tommy everywhere, would drive down the road where he died. She could not go home.
Stacie and the nurse’s assistant, Tiffany, decorated the clinic with cardboard turkeys and orange streamers. They placed a cornucopia with gourds and squashes on the table in the waiting room.
That was the first week that Lela brought in her three-year-old daughter, Darma. Lela carried her in the front door, saying in a panicked voice, “I need help here.” Tiffany immediately led the Native American woman and her child back to a room and called for Jamie. Nate was already in a room with a respiratory case. Jamie thought it was a case of asthma and treated the child for that. With oxygen in her lungs, Jamie soothed the little girl by rubbing her arm. Darma began to calm down, and so did her mother. Jamie prescribed an inhaler and a medication to reduce inflammation. It wouldn’t be the last time that Darma and her mother would come to the clinic.
Thanksgiving dinner was held at Stacie’s house. Jamie helped her with the turkey and dressing and made the gravy. She also brought sweet potato casserole and turnip greens that she had cooked the previous weekend. Stacie lit candles on her dining table and the three of them drank wine and feasted without much conversation. It was the first real Thanksgiving dinner Jamie had eaten since leaving Baker. She thought about her parents as they ate, and realized how hard it must have been on them for Jamie to never go home. Her parents had visited Jamie several times a year while she was in college and medical school. They had visited once while she was in California doing her internship. That had been a difficult trip. Her parents weren’t used to flying and it scared her mother. But they had done it to see their daughter.
When Jamie got back home, she called her parents. Her mother started to cry when she heard Jamie’s voice. When she had regained control, her mother told her that Bobby was getting married. Bobby! Her little brother. The last time she had seen Bobby was when her parents brought him on a trip to Vanderbilt. He must have been seventeen or so at the time. He was twenty-five now with a B.S. degree in electrical engineering and working for the TVA in Chattanooga.
After Thanksgiving, Stacie and Tiffany took down the decorations and put up a Christmas tree. It was a fake tree with built-in white lights, but it was pretty. Jamie got her own tree, a live one she found at a nearby farmer’s market. She had no decorations, so she bought them at Wal-Mart in Athens. Gold and silver, red and green gleamed from her tree, reflecting off the multicolored miniature lights. She bought a crystal wine decanter for Stacie and the complete Beatles collection for Nate. The three would be celebrating together, so she took boxes of candy to the clinic for Tiffany and the receptionist, Mrs. Wilcox.
On Christmas Eve, Nate and Stacie came over to Jamie’s house. “It’s chilly in here,” Nate said when he walked in. “Can I make a fire?”
“Yes,” Jamie said. “Please make a fire. I meant to do that earlier, but I’ve been so busy in the kitchen.”
The fire crackled in the fireplace as they exchanged gifts. Nate had wrapped presents for Jamie and Stacie in newspaper comics. Oh, well. It was the thought that counted. He had bought each of them a framed folk-art print from one of the crafts fairs.
After they opened their gifts, Nate got up to start the barbecue. They were having steak and baked potatoes that night. The wine, both red and white, flowed freely while the Beatles sang from the iPod. At one point, Nate danced with both Stacie and Jamie at the same time. They all danced together and collapsed in a laughing heap on the floor when “Day Tripper” was over. Jamie was happy. She couldn’t believe it.
A few days before New Year’s Eve, Stacie talked to Jamie in the supply room at the clinic. The days
had been slower that week.
“I heard from Dustin,” Stacie said out of the blue. Jamie remembered Stacie talking about Dustin, her college boyfriend.
“He wants to see me,” Stacie said. “I’m considering it. It’s not like I’m meeting anybody up here on this mountain.”
Stacie decided that she would meet Dustin on New Year’s Eve, in Knoxville where he was working at the university as a computer tech. That left Jamie and Nate to fend for themselves, but they decided to go ahead with their plans. Where else did they have to go? Nowhere, it seemed.
Around eight on New Year’s Eve, Nate came over with two bottles of white wine. Jamie had a pot of minestrone cooking on the stove. When it was ready, she would serve it with sourdough bread and salad. She had made brownies for dessert.
She felt awkward with Nate without Stacie there. The dynamics were all changed without a third person. She felt shy. Nate seemed to stumble over his words. Jamie put on a CD of jazz. Nate poured the wine and she sat on the couch with him as they listened to the music, talking occasionally.
“This feels weird,” Nate finally said. “It’s like we don’t know how to talk to each other without Stacie here.”
Jamie burst out laughing and Nate joined her. The ice was broken then, and they talked easily. Jamie spread a quilt in front of the fireplace and she and Nate sat there eating their soup and drinking glass after glass of wine. After a while, Nate got up and checked out Jamie’s iPod. “Hey,” he said. “You’ve got a Rolling Stones folder here. I’m going to put that on.”
Nate pulled two pillows off the back of the couch and put them behind them on the floor in front of the fireplace. They leaned back and listened to the Stones. They sat up and sipped from their wineglasses and lay back down again. The logs adjusted themselves in the fire, falling, and crackling again as fresher wood caught fire. Mick Jagger began to sing “Wild Horses.” Jamie closed her eyes, listening to the music. She felt her hair brush her shoulders. She felt the music vibrate through her. She was alive and tingly.
Come Down In Time (A Time Travel Romance) Page 3