Thursday Afternoons

by Tracey Richardson

  Amy’s eyes slide down to Ellis’s exposed cleavage and linger there. It’s a small victory, especially when Amy licks her lips. They still want each other. “Please don’t ask me that.”

  The server returns, takes their food order: loaded nachos and more soda water for Amy, fish and chips and a second glass of wine for Ellis. When the server leaves, Ellis says, “No, I think we need to talk about this. Amy, those weeks we had…” Ellis has to clear her throat because her heart has decided to take up residence there. “Our Thursday afternoons. They were very special to me. I would like to think they could have gone on if not for…this. It felt almost as though we were becoming friends. And I liked that. Very much. I…miss that.”

  “Ellis.”

  For a moment, Ellis thinks Amy is going to say something heartfelt, something that will echo the way she’s feeling, especially when her eyes drop to Ellis’s breasts again. Eyes that look ravenous. Eyes that are shot through with the worst kind of longing. But when she meets Ellis’s eyes again, her guard slips firmly back into place and they’re strangers again. “It’s—”

  Crap. Worst timing ever as the server returns with their food. For once couldn’t this place be like most restaurants and take forever to get the food out?

  Amy tucks into her nachos like she hasn’t eaten in a week. When she finally comes up for air, she says simply, “Ellis, what do you want from me?”

  So many emotions battle for supremacy in Ellis’s eyes: loneliness, regret, hope. Amy knows Ellis is judging her as an unfeeling ass. She’s not. But how can she possibly go about concentrating on her job every day, knowing Ellis is in the same building? Knowing she’s so damned close. Hell, she even lives a mere eight blocks away in the house behind Kate’s. And yes, Amy would love to sneak into Ellis’s office for a booty call or swing by her house late one night. Of course she would. The sex… Amy feels the blush blooming on her checks and throat, feels her breath catch as her eyes again follow their downward trajectory to Ellis’s fabulous breasts. Oh, God, the sex! It was simply glorious, every second of it, and if she could go on having sex with Ellis every Thursday for the rest of their lives, well, sign her up for that tour of duty.

  “What I want,” Ellis enunciates slowly, “is to not be adversaries. I can’t…I couldn’t handle that, Amy, not after…everything.”

  Amy gets it, she really does. She doesn’t want to be enemies either. But they’ll never see things from the same side, never understand each other’s position. “I understand. And I won’t disrespect you in public or at work or anything. But Ellis, this review you’re doing, it’s too important. It—”

  “I know it’s important. Do you think I take my work any less seriously than you take yours?”

  It takes a huge effort for Amy to refrain from saying something snarky and immature, like, “Yeah, pushing paper is the same as saving lives,” but she doesn’t. “I’m sure you do. But this hospital, it’s a big part of this community, a defining part of this community. I grew up here. I see the same people in the grocery store as I see on my operating room table or in my waiting room. We care about each other here. We’re not numbers on a spreadsheet. And I’m not sure you get that.”

  “I do get that. As much as I can, and I live here now, so I do plan to get to know the community better. Look, I know I’m an outsider, both at the hospital and in the community. Help me not to be, Amy.”

  Well, she thinks, we’ve all been that person on the outside, looking in and seeing our reflection, then acting like we’re surprised to see our own face staring back at us. It’s not a new revelation. “I can’t wave a magic wand and make you one of us.” God, why is she being so nasty to this woman? Ellis has done nothing to deserve it, and Amy can admit that she’s borrowing this hostility against things Ellis might or might not do in the future. But she can’t seem to help herself. She’s pissed at the universe, and maybe a little at Ellis too, for taking the woman she’s been sleeping with, the woman she’d begun to care about, and giving her power over the hospital’s future. It’s not that she thinks Ellis is incompetent or uncaring or has some axe to grind. It’s that Amy simply doesn’t trust anyone who hasn’t been down in the trenches to play God with the hospital’s future.

  “I’m not asking you to wave a magic wand. I’m asking you to give me a chance…to be my friend. Not, you know, sex. I know that’s crossing a line.”

  It wouldn’t truly be crossing a line to have sex, not a real line, because Ellis isn’t her superior. She’s an outside consultant who’s been brought in by the flagship hospital corporation to do a full service review of Amy’s hospital and then to make cost-efficiency recommendations. The optics of them having a sexual relationship would be terrible, but for a fleeting moment Amy imagines bringing Ellis back to her house, undressing her, making love to her until dawn splits the dark. But it would feel too much like sleeping with the enemy. Or at least, a lot like sleeping with someone she shouldn’t.

  “Look.” Amy tries to soften the sting. “I don’t see how we can possibly be friends right now, okay? But I won’t…I won’t be your enemy. I won’t be unfriendly.”

  Ellis blinks like she can’t quite believe Amy is turning down her offer of friendship. After rooting around in her purse for cash to leave on the table, she juts out her jaw defiantly. “It looks like we’re done here. I’m going to call myself a cab.”

  “No.” Amy reaches out and stills Ellis’s hand. “I’ll drop you at home. Please don’t be upset with me. I’m trying my best here, okay?”

  Ellis says nothing as she follows Amy to her car. On the drive, it’s up to Amy to initiate conversation.

  “So, your stepdaughter. Mia is it? She’s living here with you?”

  “Yes. Normally she lives with her grandparents in Windsor. But she’s here with me for the summer. She…needed to get away from certain influences in the city.”

  “I see.” Exactly how is it that Ellis has acquired a stepchild, she wants to know but doesn’t ask. There’s so much about her she doesn’t know and is dying to ask, but oh yeah, she said she didn’t want to be Ellis’s friend. She pulls up to the curb in front of Ellis’s rental house. “Man, this is a huge place. It’s gorgeous. You’re renting the whole thing?”

  “No, just the second and third floors.”

  Ellis makes a move for the door handle, but Amy reaches over and touches her arm until Ellis looks at her. That’s when the urge to touch Ellis, really touch her, becomes irresistible. She raises a hand to Ellis’s cheek, lightly cups it. The urge to kiss her is equally compelling, but somehow Amy manages to stop herself, even as her face inches closer to Ellis’s. It’s like their bodies have their own memories of one another.

  “I’m sorry,” Amy finally whispers. Women are such a mystery sometimes. There was a time she thought she had them figured out. Or maybe it’s just that this woman is such a mystery. Because she wants to be with Ellis almost as much as she wants to breathe, but then her head takes over and reminds her that Ellis has the power, the authority, to ruin the very things she’s worked so hard to attain at this hospital and in this community. Ellis, she has come to admit to herself, is not the woman she thought she was. Or more accurately, she’s not the woman Amy has built her up to be in her fantasies.

  Ellis looks at her for a long time. Then she slides out from under Amy’s touch and disappears into the night.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ellis closes her laptop and slips off her glasses as Mia sits down across from her at the dining room table. It’s so rare for the kid to actually want any kind of conversation with her, so it must be a big deal. What strikes Ellis first is the fact that Mia looks…neat and clean for a change. Her short dark hair is combed and her clothes aren’t loose and ripped and in need of laundering. The kohl eyeliner is gone too. She looks like she’s trying.

  “Can I hang out at the hospital with you tomorrow?”

  Ellis schools her expression, deciding to play it cool. She’s afraid that if she shows any sign of be
ing suspicious or skeptical about this sudden turn of events, Mia will retreat back into her morose, sulking, lazy self. “I think that would be okay, yes. Any particular reason you want to hang out there?”

  “It’s not like I have anything to do here by myself all day. And…Kate will be there, right? And Erin. I mean, Dr. Kirkland. I wanna, you know, see what kind of stuff they do there.”

  Ah, of course! Mia’s developing her first crush on an adult woman. “Okay, well, as long as you’re not in the way or anything, I’m sure it’ll be fine. I’ll clear it with someone in admin.”

  “I won’t get in the way. Hey, I got a job. Sort of.”

  “You did?” Oops. She doesn’t mean to sound so shocked.

  But Mia doesn’t appear to notice; she’s too excited about her announcement. “Kate’s asked me to cut her grass once a week. She’s going to pay me twenty bucks a pop. She has the lawnmower and everything. I just have to show up. Hey, do you think it could count towards my community service thing?”

  “What, cutting grass? No, absolutely not. But what about at the hospital? I can ask around, see if there’s some kind of volunteer work you could do there. Since you’re going to be there anyway.” Damn, she should have thought of it sooner. They’ve been here three weeks and Mia’s done nothing toward her eighty hours of community service. Her probation officer has already read her the riot act.

  Mia’s mouth forms a perfect O. “No! I don’t want anybody there to know I’m…that I got into trouble and have to do volunteer stuff. Please don’t you tell anybody!”

  “All right, I won’t. I promise. But you need to start putting in volunteer hours somewhere. As in yesterday.”

  “I know.” Mia gets up and makes herself a cup of coffee. “Oh, um, do you want one?”

  Ellis shakes her head. “Thanks, but I’ve already had a bucket of coffee today.” Wow, did she actually ask me if I wanted a cup of coffee? Who is this kid?

  “Have you met Eliana yet?” Mia asks.

  “No. Who’s Eliana?”

  Mia smiles—with actual teeth showing. “Erin…I mean, Dr. Kirkland’s little girl. They were over at Kate’s yesterday afternoon playing hopscotch on the patio and drinking iced tea. They saw me over the fence and asked me over. That’s how I got the grass cutting job.”

  “I see. Good for you.” She still can’t believe Mia’s speaking in complete sentences.

  “I might even be able to do a bit of babysitting. Erin asked me if there might be an evening here or there where I could watch Eliana for a couple of hours.” Mia screws up her face. “Funny though, she only asked me that when Kate went into the house for something. Like it was kind of a secret.”

  I need to get out more, Ellis thinks, especially since Mia’s already making more friends than I am. “That’s great, Mia. Really great.” Now if she could just get her to take her community service requirement seriously. “Why don’t you come over to the hospital tomorrow sometime after breakfast.” Which, no doubt won’t be until after ten.

  “Okay.”

  “Good.” Ellis studies Mia once more before she leaves the room. The transformation is, well, not yet remarkable, but noticeable. Right before her eyes, Mia seems to be turning into a real human being.

  * * *

  Amy is into her second hour of operating on a car crash victim. The injuries shouldn’t have been so horrific because as far as car accidents go, it was fairly minor. But there’d been a set of loose golf clubs in the back seat, and the impact sent the shaft of a club into the patient’s abdomen, piercing his vena cava. He’d only been a few blood cells away from bleeding out. It is a perfect example of why the hospital needs its ER and its surgical service. Mr. Alan Keyes would have died had the transport to hospital taken a few minutes longer.

  If only Ellis could see this, Amy thinks. How easy it is to sit in an ivory tower making decisions about cutting services, when actual people will die as a result of those decisions. But Ellis will never see those people. She won’t be here when the ambulance has to drive on by to a larger hospital with its sick or battered patients. I’ll make a list, Amy vows to herself. She’ll comb through all the records from the last five years to identify every single case where the patient outcome would have been drastically worse had the ER and the surgical service not been available. The way to fight back against someone like Ellis is not through emotional outbursts or anecdotes about patients, but with actual statistics, because that’s the world in which Ellis operates. She should have realized it sooner. Blowing up at Ellis or constantly giving her the cold shoulder is a useless, not to mention rude, exercise. Far better to shower her with information and numbers.

  Transfusions have been completed and the patient’s vitals are climbing nicely. Amy’s already moved his bowel out of the way and clamped off the damaged portion of his vena cava. Now she begins the task of suturing the holes caused by the broken shaft of the golf club. Erin’s standing next to her, carefully observing. Amy asks her again to call out the patient’s oxygen saturation, pulse, respiration, and blood pressure. Mostly because she doesn’t want to take her eyes off what she’s doing but also to keep Erin engaged. In a more minor case she’d let Erin throw in some sutures at this point, but not this time. This one is all hers.

  “I do have a job for you later,” she says to Erin. “It won’t be fun, but it’s important. And I’m afraid it’ll mean quite a few hours in front of a computer.”

  “Sure thing, Dr. Spencer. Happy to.”

  She wonders if Erin has asked Kate out on a proper date yet, but finding a way to bring up the subject has been…awkward. She doesn’t want to come across as a gossip or as a matchmaker, but she wants Kate to be happy, to find someone to have some fun with, because Kate is a people person, a coupling kind of person, and it breaks Amy’s heart to see her alone. Her thoughts wander again to Ellis. Is she lonely? She implied as much the other night, saying she didn’t know anyone in town. Well, it’s not my problem. I can’t be her friend, not right now.

  The patient is completely stable, back firmly in this world again. Once she finishes repairing the wound, she washes out his abdomen with a cleansing saline solution, begins suturing him up, then allows Erin a few token sutures toward the end.

  Amy’s pumped from the adrenaline infusion the surgery has given her. Sometimes surgeries are like running a marathon and other times they’re more like a sprint, but always, an interesting surgery is a challenge to her—a challenge she’s determined to win every single time. She won this one. In search of a fresh cup of coffee, she wanders into the cafeteria. It’s late in the afternoon; hardly anyone is here. Except… Is that Mia, Ellis’s stepdaughter, slouched at a corner table playing with an iPad? Amy has only seen her once before, at that restaurant in Windsor, but she’s sure it’s her.

  She pays for her coffee and strides purposefully to Mia’s table, sitting down without asking permission. When Mia looks up, there’s confusion and a glint of fear in her eyes. Not used to someone in scrubs seeking her out, clearly.

  “Hi. I’m Amy Spencer.” She sticks out her hand; Mia shakes it hesitantly.

  “Mia. Mia Hutton.”

  “Ellis Hall’s stepdaughter, right?”

  Mia shrugs, glances back at her iPad as though Ellis is barely an acquaintance and hardly worth talking about. The kid has a chip on her shoulder the size of a mountain, judging by the perpetual scowl engraved on her mouth. “Something like that,” she finally mumbles.

  Amy tells herself she should get up and walk away. What does she know about teenagers, anyway? Nothing, really. She’s not especially close to her sister’s kids, and she was too busy with her nose in textbooks when she herself was a teenager. But Mia Hutton looks like she’s drowning in a pool full of adults who are too busy doing their own thing to notice she’s going under.

  “You into video games?”

  “Not really.”

  “Oh. So you’re not playing a game on your iPad?”

  “Nope. Just reading.”

/>   Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat, no doubt. “I see. And what are you reading?”

  “The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.”

  “Whoa. Well-written book but there’s some pretty heavy stuff in there.”

  Another shoulder shrug. “I can handle it.”

  “You’re…okay? I mean, you’re not feeling the kind of stuff the character in the book is feeling, are you?”

  Mia looks at her in that condescending way that teenagers look at adults. “No. Are you a psychiatrist?” Annoyance flashes across her face. “Did Ellis send you to talk to me?”

  “Nope and nope. I barely even know Ellis.” Except in the carnal way of course, but Mia doesn’t need to know that. “Besides, I’m a surgeon. And an avid reader. What other classics have you read?”

  “Why?”

  A born skeptic. Which probably means she’s bright. “Just curious,” Amy says.

  “Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tolstoy, Tolkien, Austen, Salinger. Some newer stuff too, like Franzen and Frey. I really like Angie Thomas, her stuff is cool.”

  Amy sets her half-empty cup down and stands up. “Come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “You’ll see.”

  She’s surprised Mia follows her without protest to the hospital’s library, tucked into a corner of the basement. There are a couple thousand books on shelves, a few comfortable chairs scattered around, and a computer for patients and staff to use.

  “This is our library and it’s for patients, staff, and visitors. It’s open twenty-four-seven, but we don’t have enough volunteers to staff it. Or to bring the mobile book cart around to patients. Can you start tomorrow? A couple hours a day would be amazing for us. More, if you can swing it.”

  “What? Me?”

  “Yes, you. Got anything better to do? And clearly you know books. ”

  “I-I don’t know. I mean…I guess I could.”

  “It doesn’t pay, but you’d be awesome at it. I’ll send an email to admin to let them know. Meet me here tomorrow morning at nine. Sharp. We’ll get you squared away.” She should be done with rounds by then, but Mia looks at her like nine is an ungodly hour.