by Aiden Bates
"Language, Carter." Mama never did like to hear salty language coming from him. "So he's a cheapskate."
"He's the cheapskate to end all cheapskates. I'm at my wit's end. He cut back nurses' hours across the department. All nurses, regardless of circumstances. He said that if overtime is seasonal, due to snow and cold and flu season, then no one should mind cutting back to even out the annual budget. And he slashed hours."
"The man's a damn fool is what he is." Something rattled in the background. "What are you doing about it?"
"Well, I had to send three patients to another hospital this week. I didn't want to, and the patients sure were mad, but what was I going to do? We didn't have the staff to take care of them." Carter closed his eyes. "We kept the riskiest cases, and the omegas, because there's not another hospital with an omega ward this side of the Hudson. But Mama, one of those mothers that we turned away came very close to losing her baby, and she's not going to be able to have any more. They had to go to an emergency C-section." Hot tears seared his eyelids. "Which they botched."
"My God." Mama dropped something; it clattered against the linoleum floor like cymbals on the ground. "Why is he doing this?"
"I don't know. He has a personal vendetta against me. He thinks I'm trying to show him up, because I didn't sit there and passively accept the pile of crap he was telling us and because there were a couple of incidents here—"
"Oh don't worry, sugar. I know all about Doctor Bae." She chuckled. "Someone papered my locker with copies of your picture from the paper. You know, the one in the swim trunks."
"Oh Lord." Carter pulled one of the couch cushions over his face. "Thanks for that. Remind me to only come back to Dyersburg under cover of darkness from now on. Anyway, this guy seems to have a special hate-on just for me, but then he wants to go golfing with me."
"Golfing?" Carter would have sworn that he could hear the wrinkle in his mother's nose. "That's kind of weird."
"I know, right? I didn't think anyone under the age of eighty still golfed, but apparently they do. It was more of a workout than I expected. Not my cup of tea, though."
"Wait, you went with him?" Mama squawked. "Carter Andrew Idoni, are you out of your mind?"
"I didn't exactly feel like I had a lot of options. He is my boss, ultimately, and I kind of had to. But I don't know. He's a weird guy, and I'm not sure what to make of him." Carter kicked his shoes off.
"Oh, sugar, no wonder he hates you so much. If he knows you're an omega, it probably just makes him even madder when you stand up to him. I mean, he's probably used to people just following orders and a lot of guys get even angrier when women and omegas defy them." Mama gave a little sigh. "Maybe we didn't do you any favors, when we taught you to stand your ground like that."
"I don't know. I think I'm doing okay. I have a job that I love, and I'm pretty well respected in my field. It's the other folks who have the problem, not me." He wondered if he could somehow float into the kitchen and get himself some water.
"I just think that if they think they're getting their way, they'll be a little more likely to give some concessions to you. But you may be right. There's probably something else going on there anyway. He's not going to risk the entire hospital because he hates one omega. What are you going to do?"
Carter forced himself to sit up. "Well, for tonight, I'm going to have a nice hot bath and go to bed. I might even have a bubble bath, just because I can. Tomorrow, I'm going to march right on down to that man's office and I'm going to explain to him exactly why he can't pull nurses out of life and death situations."
"Don't get fired, Carter."
Carter shook his head. "I'm not going to get fired, Mama. And if I do, the whole city will know exactly what happened. I can get another job anytime I want."
"So do it. Memphis doesn't have an obstetrician certified to care for omegas. You could be among your own people. If you're going to be alone, you could at least be alone among your own kind." She cut herself off. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that."
Carter's heart gave a little wrench. "It's okay, Mama. You shouldn't hold back with your family. You know we're going to love you no matter what. And yeah, I probably should leave town anyway. There's no point in hanging around here like some kind of lonely ghost, you know? It wouldn't be so bad if he acted like he was taken, and did right by Paul, but he keeps sleazing at me." He didn't need to specify that he'd changed subjects. Rhoda knew.
"That boy never was any good. Come home."
"We'll see, Mama." Carter put his feet on the ground. "Listen, I'm going to go pop into the tub now. I've got some mischief to plan. I'll talk to you soon, okay?"
"Love you, baby."
"Love you too, Mama." Carter hung up. He did in fact have a lot of mischief to plan.
The next day, bolstered by a long night spent among rose-scented suds with a legal file and a telephone, Carter headed down to Finn Riley's office.
Marcia, the admin so ancient that she still insisted on being referred to as a secretary, greeted him with a broad smile. "Dr. Idoni, how are you doing? My granddaughter is already up and around after you brought her twins into the world a month ago! She swears you're the best thing since sliced bread."
Carter smiled at Marcia and handed her the flowers he'd bought for her. They weren't anything special. He'd bought them at the hospital gift shop, and she'd have recognized them as coming from the hospital gift shop, but they still brought a huge smile to her face anyway. "Good morning, Ms. Marcia. It's a lovely June day. I need to speak with Mr. Riley. I don't have an appointment, but it's actually pretty important. He's not going to want to hear it, but it's probably best to get it over with sooner rather than later."
Marcia wrinkled her nose. "That's usually the way with bad news, isn't it?" She sighed. "He's not going to be happy about this. He comes from New Jersey, you know. They're very creative with their profanity down there, and he's used every single epithet that he knows in conjunction with your name."
Carter felt a little pang at that. He hated himself for it.
He winked at Marcia. "Let's see if I can't get him to invent some new curse words just for me, shall we? A man does like to feel special."
She laughed out loud, two spots of pink coming into her cheeks. "I'll see what I can do." She pressed the intercom button on her phone. "Mr. Riley? Dr. Idoni's here to see you. He says it's important."
The phone beeped back at her immediately. "Is he here to offer his resignation?"
"Not that he told me." She looked up at Carter, dismay giving her eyes and mouth the same round look.
"I only want to see him if he's come to tell me he's moving on to greener pastures."
Carter circled around to Marcia's side of the desk and pressed the intercom button himself. "Well now, Mr. Riley, it sure is nice to know you're thinking of me. Your pastures are about to get a lot less green if you don't listen to what I have to tell you. So we can do this the hard way or we can do this the easy way but you're going to find out about this whether you want to or not."
He waited a moment, while Marcia stared at him with a mixture of horror and amusement on her face. Then the door to Riley's office opened up.
Carter didn't wait to be invited. He walked in and seated himself on the green leather sofa. Riley wasn't alone. He was there with Jason Delancey, the hospital's General Counsel. Carter would have preferred to handle this in private, but his backup plan had been to go to Delancey anyway. "Gentlemen," he said, settling himself into position with an arrogant sprawl. "I'm glad to see you both. I'm here to talk about your cutbacks to nursing hours down in Obstetrics."
"Oh for the love of God, Idoni, we don't have time to talk about individual departments. This is a standing meeting with the General Counsel." Riley pinched the bridge of his nose. "This is really a bridge too far. I've been tolerant of your insubordination so far but this constitutes a terminable offense."
"So you want me to go to the media with this lawsuit instead?" Carter let his lips
curl into a feline smirk. He wasn't like this, normally, but it seemed to be the only way to get Riley's attention. "Mr. Delancey, I don't know if you've seen it yet, but it was filed late yesterday. The patient and her husband are both personal friends." He passed a copy of the lawsuit to Delancey.
Delancey looked it over and looked up at Riley. "This isn't good, Finn."
Riley's lip curled as he looked over at Carter. "Okay. I'll bite. Why would a lawsuit have you running down here to bother me in the middle of a meeting?"
Carter crossed his ankles and stretched. "I'm so glad you asked. Do you remember that day when we first met?"
"Vividly." Finn's tone was dry and his eyes were cool. "As I recall, you openly defied me in a departmental meeting and then did it again in private."
"Yes, when I told you that the hospital's reputation for patient care was the basis for all of its donations and grants. When you cut nursing hours to the obstetrics department, you ensured that there wouldn't be enough nurses to cover patient volume. During this past week, three patients that presented at labor and delivery were turned away and routed to other hospitals, because we didn't have enough nurses to take care of them."
"These things happen. I know you don't like to hear it, Dr. Idoni, but sometimes we have to turn patients away. We're not a money tree."
"We're not a profit center either. We're a non-profit hospital and we need to be able to call in for additional help when we're short staffed. Now, we'll leave the labor relations issues out of it, because I'm pretty sure that I don't get to speak for the nurse's union. What I can tell you is that as a direct result of being turned away from our hospital, Abigail Jenkins' baby went into fetal distress. She needed an emergency cesarean when she got to the next hospital. That cesarean, which had to be performed by an emergency room doctor since that hospital doesn't even have an obstetric surgeon on staff, was rushed.
"When you rush a surgery like that, accidents happen. They had to do an emergency hysterectomy to save Abigail Jenkins' life. Her baby came very close to dying, and there may be complications to be seen down the road. He's still in the NICU, by the way.
"Her lawyer isn't blaming that hospital. They weren't equipped to deal with an emergency situation and they were out of time. They're blaming Silver Oak, because there was no reason that they shouldn't have been able to deliver here other than the negligence of insufficient staffing." Carter's smile turned grim.
"I warned you, Riley. I told you that this would happen. The Jenkins are personal friends of mine and they called me up to give me the heads up, as a courtesy. One lawsuit might not destroy this hospital, and your career, but it's a warning. You caused this. A twenty-five-year-old woman has been left infertile for the rest of her life. She's going to have to receive dangerous artificial hormone treatments, because of you. Your choices. Your personal vendetta against me.
"Your problem is with me, so take it out on me. Not on the nurses in my department, and not on innocent women, omegas, and children. At the end of the day, you're going to take yourself down, and you're going to hurt a lot of good people along the way."
"You raise some concerning points." Delancey lifted the lawsuit file. "You were right, I hadn't seen this. Do you mind if I hang onto it?"
"It's yours to keep. I have my own, and I'm sure you'll get a formal copy or whatever it is that they do." Carter rolled his shoulders. He needed to calm down. "Remember what I told you, Riley. If you've got a personal grievance with me, keep it personal. These people didn't do a damn thing to you."
Carter turned on his heel and walked out. He stopped at Marcia's desk and thanked her for her help, and then he headed back to his office.
***
Finn looked at Jason as the door shut behind Idoni. "Can you believe the nerve of that guy?"
Jason looked up at Finn with his mouth set into a grim line. "I can't believe it got this far. Did he really have to ambush you in your office, without an appointment, to inform you about a lawsuit against this hospital? A multi-million-dollar lawsuit against this hospital, too?"
Finn shook his head. "Don't be overdramatic. People file lawsuits against hospitals all the time. Remember the time that those people filed a lawsuit against St. Raphael Medical down in Georgia because we couldn't cure the gangrene they got from shooting up?"
Jason's lip curled a little. "This is a different case entirely, Finn. For one thing, no jury is going to accept the idea that the mother brought it on herself. For another, I mean sure, they probably won't get twenty million dollars, but they'll probably get a decent award. There's no reason to turn them away but the staffing shortage—an artificial staffing shortage. What are you thinking? Do you really have that much of a vendetta against Idoni?"
Finn pursed his lips. It was one thing for Idoni to be insubordinate. Jason was something else entirely. Finn couldn't do much about him, not without a lot of effort. He didn't want to get rid of him either. He'd known him for years, and he respected Jason. The question still rankled. "It's not about my personal issues with Idoni. I will point out that Idoni and I went golfing last weekend. If I had such an issue with him, we wouldn't have done that.
"But he is an insubordinate little shit, and I can't have that in my hospital. It's also a matter of economics. His department is the most expensive department of any other department we have. Some of those costs are sunk costs. We can't not pay insurance, and the only department that pays more for insurance is anesthesiology. We need all of the specialized equipment that they use down there, or so they tell me. We can stretch out the amortization schedules and try to avoid buying anything new for a while, but that's just an accounting trick. The only cost down there that we can truly control is labor."
"Okay, but I'm having trouble believing that someone who accelerated through the ranks the way that you did, and who has a master's degree in healthcare management, would just ham-handedly cut nurses' hours the way that you did. You had to know that it would be a huge liability for the hospital."
Finn rolled his head back in his seat. "The thought might have occurred to me. And it might have occurred to me that we needed to be willing to take a risk in order to make cutbacks. I honestly didn't think that there would be consequences in this particular department. I figured that this would be the safest department to make cutbacks. They seemed overstaffed, and when Idoni told me that the overtime issues were seasonal I just figured that it would be a piece of cake to straighten that out."
Jason shook his head. "You didn't think that one through at all."
"I could have thought it through better." Finn rubbed at his face with his hands for a second, and then he looked up. Rage burned through him. "Do you think that he set us up?"
"Do I think that Carter Idoni, one of the best obstetricians in the region and one of the absolute top omega specialists in the country, lowered himself to sabotage his friend's childbirth and future fertility to make you look bad? As a matter of fact, Finn, no. No, I don't." Jason gave Finn a long, measured look. "I kind of think that it says more about you, that your mind just went right there, instead of saying something about him."
Finn grunted in frustration. "It just seems like every time I turn around, he's trying to build roadblocks for me. I could be so much further along with my plan for Silver Oak if it weren't for that Tennessee doctor and his refusal to understand that we need to get costs down." He stood up and paced over to the couch Carter had sprawled upon.
It still smelled like him.
Finn hated that the couch still smelled like wood smoke, even after only a few seconds' contact with a fully clothed omega. He hated the fact that he wished Jason would leave, so that he could wallow in Idoni's scent for a little while.
"The thing is, Finn, Idoni's right. When patient care starts to suffer, the hospital starts to suffer. Part of my job is to safeguard the reputation of this institution. This lawsuit is going to come out in the press soon. Idoni didn't need to come in here and tell us anything. He wanted to give us—you—the chance
to fix things. So let's work on that. Our first priority needs to be damage control." Jason didn't get up from his chair. He just pulled a yellow legal pad from his briefcase and started writing.
"Well obviously the suit has no merit. Let's pretend that Idoni didn't get rid of her on purpose to make us look bad. Sometimes there are bad outcomes. Sometimes it can't be helped. I'm sure he's had his share of screw ups and emergency hysterectomies. Let's find those and bring those up in court." Finn spun on his heel and bore down on Jason.
"Ah, no, Finn, Idoni's not a party to this lawsuit. He'll probably be called to testify about the staffing shortages, which should scare the hell out of you, but he's not the one suing. I suggest that we settle for three million. It's more reasonable, and it acknowledges that we made an error in those sweeping cuts."
"We did not make an error!" Finn seethed, furious that Jason would suggest that he'd contributed to this debacle.