Catching Christmas

by Terri Blackstock

  “We’re here.”

  “Where?”

  “The doctor’s office. You have an appointment at two. This is the place, right?”

  “I . . . I’m not sure. Heavens, I don’t know where my manners are.”

  “Your manners?”

  “Yes. I’m Callie. And you are?”

  “The cab driver.”

  “Oh,” she says.

  “It’s six-fifty,” I say a little too loudly, assuming she’s hard of hearing. “I’ll get your wheelchair.”

  She has ten dollars in her hand when I come back. I shove it into my pocket, then help her into the chair. “Ma’am, can you get yourself to the office?”

  “What office?”

  “The doctor’s office. This is the clinic where your appointment is.”

  She looks toward the building. Zero sign of comprehension. Nada. She could be going into a movie theater for all she knows.

  “Can you wheel yourself? Or do you need me to push you in there?”

  “That would be so nice,” she says. “I’m Callie. And who are you?”

  “Finn.” I slam the door a little too hard and lock it even though it’s still running. My luck, some patient doped up on painkillers will hijack it and try to fly with it. Hopefully I can get back before someone lobs a brick through the window.

  I roll her through the doors. “Do you remember who your doctor is?”

  Of course she doesn’t. She looks confused and opens her purse, sifts through for something.

  “Ma’am? Your doctor?”

  When she doesn’t find whatever she’s looking for, I push her toward the check-in desk. “Ma’am, what’s your last name?” I ask her.

  “Callie Beecher,” she says.

  “I’m Finn,” I say quickly before she can ask me again. I have to wait in line as patients before me sign in with the slowest scrawls I can imagine.

  Callie gradually comes alive as she looks around at all the people in line. She taps the young woman standing in front of her. “I used to have hair that color.” Her voice is loud, commanding attention. “Red on the head, they used to say. Do they say that to you?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “My granddaughter has hair that color, but she dyes it blonde. My daughter’s wasn’t red, though. Hers was naturally blonde, thankfully.”

  Past tense. The woman must have outlived her daughter.

  “She cried when her baby had red hair,” she drones on. “She said redheads are hideous. I tried not to take it personal.”

  The girl looks graciously amused. “She said that?”

  Callie’s expression goes blank for a moment, and I’m pretty sure she’s lost her train of thought. She looks around, then her gaze settles on the girl again. She stares at her for a moment, as if it’s the first time she’s seen her. “You won’t be winning any beauty contests, but I think you’re pretty.”

  “Thank you.” The girl clearly has a sense of humor—she grins at those gasping and chuckling around her. In spite of my irritation, I can’t help grinning, too.

  A nurse who hasn’t missed many meals comes out a side door and calls to the next patient.

  Callie notices her, then looks over at the redhead. In a voice way too loud for the room, she says, “Are my thighs that big?”

  The nurse turns, fire in her eyes, but when she sees that the person insulting her is older than Methuselah, she just shakes her head. Everyone around us stifles a grin.

  “No, ma’am,” the redhead giggles.

  “I used to have cable TV,” Callie goes on, “and I would watch that show about the chubby nurse. What was her name?”

  The girl is losing control of her giggles now, and tears are surfacing in her eyes. “I don’t know.”

  “She had a pretty face, though.”

  I don’t make eye contact with Callie for fear she’ll try to pull me into her lunacy.

  Finally, the person in front of us is finished, and I move to the front. The bored receptionist looks up at me. “Help you?”

  “Yes, I have Callie Beecher here to see the doctor.”

  “Which doctor?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We have thirty doctors here.”

  I lean over the desk. “Can you look her up? She’s having some memory problems.”

  The woman types in the name. “Her appointment is with Dr. Patrick. Wait over there and they’ll call her.”

  “She might be a little hard of hearing, and she falls asleep a lot, so you might need to go get her when they call her.”

  The receptionist looks like she couldn’t care less, but she gives me a noncommittal nod.

  I push Callie to the waiting area, lock her wheelchair, and bend toward her. “Ma’am, here’s my card. If you need me to come back and get you when you’re done, just call this number.”

  The middle-aged woman sitting next to her looks at me like I’m pond scum. “You’re leaving her alone?”

  “Lady, I’m just the cab driver.”

  “Oh.”

  “Her name’s Callie Beecher. Would you keep an ear out for them to call her?”

  “Yes, if they don’t call me first.”

  I look down at Callie. “Ma’am, you put that card somewhere where you can find it again, okay?”

  She tucks it into her purse, then turns to the woman next to her and says, “I don’t know where my manners are. I’m Callie. And you are?”

  I take that opportunity to slip back out to my cab.

  CHAPTER 2

  Sydney

  My hair is driving me nuts. My bangs are too long and falling into my eyes, but I don’t have time to go to the hairdresser. I should probably just whack it off myself, but that has ended disastrously before, usually when I’m stressed. When I was a teenager studying for my SATs, my dad hid every pair of scissors in the house so I couldn’t scalp myself.

  “Yes, I’m holding for the doctor . . . No, he can’t call me back, because I’m going to be in a meeting. Please, can I just speak to him now? It’ll take five minutes . . . Okay, one minute. I can talk fast.”

  I glance through the glass wall into my law firm’s conference room. Half of the meeting’s attendees are already there, though they’re hardly aware of each other since most of them are focused on their phones. I hear voices up the hall, and I see the partners walking in a pack toward me—just as a woman picks up at the other end of my call.

  “Hello, this is Sandra, the nurse. The doctor’s in with a patient. Can I help you?”

  “I’ve already talked to you, Sandra,” I say, lowering my voice to almost a whisper. “I asked you to have him call me, and you didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m having trouble hearing you.”

  The partners are lingering at the door, not three feet from me. I have to get in there now. “You already have a message from me to give him. Please give it to him. If he calls me I’ll try to answer. Please. It’s important I talk to him as soon as possible.”

  I click off the phone, plaster a smile on my face, and greet my bosses as I slip into the room. I take my place among the other first-year associates, who suddenly look engaged as the heavyweights enter the room. My friend Joanie has saved me a chair next to her, too close to the Christmas tree decorated by the priciest interior decorator in town. The heat of the incandescent lights is going to make me sweat.

  “Did she get there?” Joanie whispers behind her hand as I sit down.

  “Who knows? If the cab company didn’t send someone, I’m suing them.”

  “I covered for you at lunch. They don’t know you were late.”

  “Thanks. I had to get her dressed. She was still in her pajamas.”

  “You have got to get help for her.”

  “I know, but I can’t afford it.”

  The meeting comes to order, and I try to focus on the senior partner who’s presiding—the Southerby in Southerby, Maddox, and Hanes. But my mind keeps wandering to my grandmother who was staring into space last night in
front of her hours-old Meals on Wheels lunch, which she hadn’t touched.

  Her decline in the last few days has been so rapid. Maybe it’s just some virus that has made her seem worse than she is, or maybe she isn’t sleeping well. I was going to take her to the doctor today myself, but then the partners called this meeting for the exact same time as the appointment. I couldn’t risk missing it.

  Mr. Southerby is twirling an unlit cigarette in his fingers as he talks. His heart attack last year scared him into quitting, but he still carries one wherever he goes. “And as you know,” he continued, “billing has been down in the last quarter. We blame a couple of lawsuits that didn’t come out in our favor, and a few lost clients due to Benedict Simon’s leaving the firm.”

  Everyone chuckles at the “Benedict” part of the name, because Simon’s real name is Larry. His leaving with some major clients has made the partners bitter.

  “Long story short, we tell you this with great regret, but we are going to be downsizing our staff, and that means we’ll be letting a few of our first-year associates go.”

  I gasp. He has my full attention now. I look at the others around me. Everyone is gaping at him, waiting for the ax to fall. “We’ll be calling some of you into meetings this afternoon and letting you know whether you’ll be kept on or let go. Those of you who stay on will have to step it up. You’ll obviously be doing the work of two or three people, so if you can’t handle that, perhaps you should go ahead and step down.”

  Is he looking at me as he says that, or is that just my imagination? I roll my chair back a few inches, hoping the flashing tree will hide me.

  What am I going to do if they fire me?

  When the meeting is over, the partners leave first, probably so they won’t be ambushed in the hall. Some of the associates get up and follow them out, no doubt hoping to convince them that they’re indispensable to the team. I sit frozen, staring at the air in front of me.

  “It’s going to be me,” I tell Joanie, who’s also paralyzed beside me. “He was looking at me when he said that thing about stepping down if you didn’t think you could hack it.”

  “But if you were getting fired, there wouldn’t be anything to step down from. Besides, I thought he was looking at me.”

  “Why would he look at you? You haven’t been coming in late because you can’t get your grandmother bathed and dressed on time, no matter how early you get there, because something always goes wrong.”

  “But maybe they know I’ve been covering for you. Maybe they’re madder at me than they are at you. You’re more valuable, after all. You did good work on the Krieleg case, and they were awarded a hundred million dollars. We lost the last case I went to court on. Plus you’re on the Darco case. They’re not going to fire you the day before you go to court.”

  I sigh. “It’s the stupidest case in the history of lawsuits, which is guaranteed to ruin my reputation whether I win or lose.”

  “If you win, it will make our biggest client happy.”

  “Get real. Everyone knows this is a losing battle. His kid provides the alcohol for a dorm party, then smashes his car into a Burger King after he gets wasted, so the kid sues the school for allowing him to get that drunk. And when I finish this one, I get to represent this stellar young man as he sues Burger King.”

  “Like I said, job security. Stupid cases have been won before.”

  “But any of us could work on this case and get the same result.” I blow out a frustrated breath and take a quick inventory of my accomplishments here because I may need to remind the partners of them. It doesn’t seem like enough, and some of the other first-years have been so much more successful. “And anyway, I was a second on the Krieleg case. I don’t get the credit.”

  “You worked day and night, and most of what they used in court was stuff you found. They’re not going to let you go.”

  “Then who?”

  “I don’t know. They didn’t even say how many. I’m gonna be sick.” Joanie slides her chair back and stands up.

  She does look pale. I watch her leave the room, then I look toward the podium again, trying to remember exactly what Mr. Southerby was saying when he glanced toward me. Was it really the “can’t commit to long hours” part?

  I can’t just sit here. I have a million things to do before court tomorrow, and I have to keep working as if I’m valuable to someone. I make myself get out of my chair and leave the room. For a minute I stand in the hallway as though I don’t know how to find my office. What is wrong with me? I have to be on top of my game.

  As I walk, I look down at my phone to see if I’ve been summoned yet to the downsizing talk, but my mind quickly slips back to the call to the doctor’s office. I check to see if they called while I had my phone on silent.

  No, not yet. Why can’t they call me back? Surely they know by now that my grandmother isn’t in her right mind and needs medication.

  I don’t have time to obsess about her. Grammy will be fine. Surely the doctor will figure it out.

  But how? You can’t drop a car off at a mechanic’s and not tell him what’s wrong with it, and hope he’ll figure out that it makes a squealing noise whenever you put it in reverse. What if he never tries putting it in reverse?

  What if Grammy seems lucid for the five minutes the doctor talks to her and he considers her fine? Then we’ll have to go back again.

  My desk phone buzzes, and I push the button. “Yes?”

  “The partners are asking for you,” Nora, my assistant, says.

  “Already?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like now?”

  “That’s what they said. Mr. Southerby’s office.”

  What does it mean that I’m one of the first? I straighten my skirt and try to tame my hair, but it’s useless.

  I’m just outside Southerby’s office door when my phone chirps. I glance down and see that it’s the doctor’s office. I start to answer, but the secretary sees me and, avoiding eye contact, picks up the phone and tells her boss that I’m here.

  I can’t take the call now. I’ll have to call the doctor back and go through the whole thing again. I drop the phone into my pocket, plaster on my most-reliable-and-committed-employee-who-loves-long-hours smile, and step into the lions’ den.

  CHAPTER 3

  Finn

  The old woman is like a parasite, clinging to my brain no matter what else I try to think about. As I deliver a group of five people to a hotel—five people who’ve squeezed in even though I tried to tell them to take the van behind me—I check my watch. Two hours since Callie’s appointment. She hasn’t called me to come get her.

  Is she okay?

  Disgusted with myself for worrying about her, I turn and head back to the hospital. I pull up in the drive-through area and leave my car running again while I retrace my steps to the waiting area and look around for the old woman.

  There she sits, exactly where I left her. Her chin has dropped to her chest, and she’s sound asleep. “You gotta be kidding me.” I storm toward the disinterested receptionist and step in front of the person she’s disinterested in now.

  “Excuse me. Has Callie Beecher seen the doctor yet?”

  She looks just past me. “Sir, please get in line.”

  “No,” I say, almost yelling. “Come on, just look. She’s a hundred and fifty years old and she’s been sitting there for two hours. Did Callie Beecher see the doctor or not?”

  Too bored for words, the woman types Callie’s name into the computer. Her lids lower, and she looks back at me. “It says she wasn’t here when they called her.”

  “What do you mean she wasn’t here? Since two o’clock she’s been right there where I parked her! I told you they had to go to her, that she might be asleep or hard of hearing.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but it’s not our job to—”

  “To what? Take care of sick people?”

  She purses her lips and shoots me a piercing look.

  “So you’re telling me that she
hasn’t seen him? Then take her back now. I’ll wait.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, sir. I’m helping this gentleman right now. Please get in line.”

  I slap both hands on the counter. “Take her back now, or I’m going to make the rest of your day a living nightmare!”

  The woman rises to her feet as someone else—a manager?—comes around the wall. “What’s going on here?”

  The receptionist turns away from me and whispers something to the manager, and they both look back at me like I’m a security risk. “Okay,” the manager says to me. “Bring her on in.”

  “Oh no,” I say quickly. “I’m not bringing her in. I’m not a family member. I don’t want to see the doctor with her. I’m just her ride.” I point to her. “You have to go over there and get her. She can’t be the first old person in a wheelchair who’s ever come here. What are you people?”

  The manager looks frazzled and goes toward Callie, roughly slaps her footrests up, and unlocks the chair. The nurse with the thighs comes to the door to call someone else, but the manager shoves Callie toward her. Callie’s head bobs.

  “She needs to see Dr. Patrick right away,” the manager tells the nurse. “Otherwise this gentleman here who isn’t a family member and won’t lift a finger is going to pitch a holy fit, and we’ll have to call security.”

  “I’m the cab driver,” I grit out.

  Callie comes awake as the nurse rolls her through the door, and I hear her saying, “Where are my manners?”

  Blowing out an irritated breath, I drop into a chair and pick up a women’s magazine that lies on the seat next to me. I flip to the back where they usually keep recipes. I pause at a picture of beef bourguignon and read over the ingredients. Red onions? Who puts red onions in beef bourguignon? Everyone knows you make it with pearl onions.

  Amateurs.

  I flip through the other recipes and conclude that no one on the magazine staff has tested any of these dishes, otherwise they’d know better.

  My culinary teacher would have gotten a good laugh out of this.

  I fling the magazine into a chair a couple of seats away and cross my arms. My leg jitters as thoughts flit through my mind about what a fool I was to come back here and sign up for this. I could have just waited and let her genius family—wherever they are—look for her and realize that sending her to the doctor on her own was a bad idea. It’s not my job to watch over her.