Family Practice

by Marisa Carroll

  Any plans he had of spending the rest of the weekend fishing sank like a stone tossed into the waters of White Pine Lake.

  When he’d come in and discovered the flooding, he’d shut off the electricity and the propane supply and called Rudy. That was four hours ago. He’d been on damage control ever since.

  Cold water began dripping on his head. He flipped the switch on the shop vac and took a prudent step to one side, wondering how much the exam rooms would have to be dried out. The emergency shutoff system seemed to have done its job in that part of the L-shaped building, and hopefully Burt Abrahms from the hardware store would show up soon with some extra extension cords and a couple big fans to hurry along the process. If the ceiling didn’t collapse first.

  “Rudy,” he yelled. “Why the heck isn’t the water off? The ceiling’s ready to cave in. It’s looking like the last few minutes of the Titanic in here.”

  “Good heavens,” a shocked female voice responded—not his handyman’s. “What happened?”

  Zach didn’t make the mistake of thinking she was a tourist who had wandered inside. Though they’d never been introduced, he’d noticed her picture on the wall in the White Pine Lake Bar and Grill, and most recently on the front page of the White Pine Lake Flag in an article announcing her graduation from the University of Michigan Medical School.

  Dr. Callie Layman, M.D., wasn’t supposed to arrive in town until tomorrow. But here she was.

  He’d been wondering what else could go wrong. Now he had his answer.

  “Broken water line in the sprinkler system, ma’am,” he said, eight years of military protocol kicking in. “Situation’s under control.”

  She raised one hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the harsh emergency lighting and gave him a skeptical look. “It doesn’t appear to be under control at all, as far as I can see.”

  Something in her cool, detached tone and her equally cool, detached appearance—despite the fact that she had apparently just driven over three hundred miles in hot July weather—rankled, but Zach stopped himself from snapping his reply. “We’ll be open for business by Monday morning. I give you my word, Dr. Layman.”

  She gave him another sharp glance. “Have we met?”

  “No,” he admitted. No reason to be churlish. He held out his hand after wiping it dry on his shorts. “I’m Zach Gibson, your PA. Welcome back to White Pine Lake.”

  She wasn’t as tall as he was, but she wasn’t a short woman, either. He guessed about five foot seven or eight, maybe a hundred and thirty pounds. Her mouth was thinner than he preferred on a woman, but a rounded chin and a nose that could only be called “pert” softened the overall contours of her face, framed by cinnamon-brown hair. Her eyes were hazel, big and fringed with long, gold-tipped lashes, and saved her from being plain. She wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous. Many wouldn’t even call her pretty, but for some reason he’d found her face interesting in photographs—at least in the rare ones where she’d been smiling—and now, in person, he found her even more appealing.

  “Thank you,” she said. Her tone was dubious, and frankly he couldn’t blame her, considering the condition of her future workplace. “How do you plan to clean up this mess?”

  “My buddy’s got a construction business. He’s here hunting down the source of the leak and hopefully shutting it down.”

  “Only the two of you? You need to get more people in here.”

  Zach didn’t let the judgmental remark goad him into a retort. “I called your father. He’s rounding up some volunteers.” She had grown up in this town. Surely she realized people would pitch in to help once word went out? Or had she been living in the rarified world of a Big Ten medical school so long she’d forgotten her roots?

  She might have blushed but he couldn’t be sure with the lousy lighting. “Of course they’ll come.”

  Though she didn’t offer to pitch in and grab a mop herself. Great, was she going to be one of those kinds of doctors, the ones with the God complexes and the egos to go with it?

  “We weren’t expecting you until tomorrow,” he said as the ominous sound of dripping water filled the silence between them.

  “I left Ann Arbor a day early.” She peered around at the boxes of rescued lab supplies and disintegrating cartons of exam gloves, the empty, wide-open refrigerator with the remains of a collapsed ceiling tile still piled on top, balanced precariously on the carcass of the shorted-out police scanner. A frown drew her arched brows together. “Do you have an assessment of the damages?” She didn’t bother to make eye contact this time, just clipped out the question. “Will we be able to see patients on schedule Monday morning?”

  Great, she was going to be one of those ramrod-and-ruin kinds. It was going to be a long summer. But two could play at her game. “We lost the computer system and the police scanner, ma’am. That’s the worst so far. I don’t believe there’s any structural damage to the building.”

  “But the mess.” She made a little sweeping gesture with her right hand. “There’s water everywhere—”

  “Incoming,” Rudy yelled from the doorway. Zach reached out and wrapped his fingers around Callie’s wrist, hauling her forward and almost into his arms as three overhead tiles crashed to the floor, splattering Zach and Callie with water and soggy, cardboardlike shrapnel.

  He was wearing old cargo shorts and an even older T-shirt, and he was already wet through, but his new boss hadn’t been expecting a dousing. She let out a shocked gasp as the cold water cascaded down her back and soaked her to the skin.

  * * *

  “SORRY ABOUT THAT, Doc.”

  Callie shifted her attention to the man in the doorway, a short, ruddy-faced, stocky guy with a buzz cut not doing anything to hide his receding hairline, and laughing blue eyes. He was wearing a faded red T-shirt emblazoned with U*S*M*C in equally faded gold letters, and shorts that exposed the prosthesis that replaced his left leg below the knee. His leather tool belt hung low on his hips, as if he were an old-time gunslinger. Rudy Koslowski. She remembered him from high school, even though he’d been a couple of years ahead of her. He’d joined the Marines immediately after graduation and lost his leg in a suicide-bomb attack in Afghanistan.

  “Hi, Rudy,” she said, swallowing a sharp comment about the inadequacy of his warning. Rudy had always been a gossip even as a kid. She doubted he’d changed much over the years, and the last thing she wanted was to be reported to all and sundry as a bitch her first day on the job. “Quite a welcome home you arranged for me.”

  “We aim to please. You still got the moves, Doc,” he said next.

  “I beg your pardon?” But Rudy wasn’t looking at her; he was grinning at the man beside her.

  “Oops.” Rudy chuckled, his expression as mischievous as Callie remembered from high school. “Guess we’re going to have to figure out another nickname for you, Corpsman. Can’t have two Docs in the place, can we?” He paused as if waiting for his barb to strike home.

  Rudy was smiling, but Zach wasn’t. “Stow it, Rudy. She outranks us.”

  “Sure thing.” Rudy raised both hands, signaling surrender, but his grin grew a little wider as he stared pointedly at their joined hands. “Whatever you say.” Belatedly Callie tugged herself free of Zach’s grasp. Why hadn’t she noticed Zach was still holding her hand before Rudy did? Maybe because she had enjoyed the feel of Zach’s long, strong fingers wrapped around her wrist. He had big hands, but his hold on her had been gentle. He would have no trouble setting a bone or reducing a dislocation with those hands and that strength, even in a combat situation. Experience she certainly didn’t have.

  “Zach’s patients may call him whatever they and he are comfortable with,” she said, appalled at how condescending the remark sounded. She hadn’t meant it that way. She avoided speaking to colleagues in that manner, although she’d been talked down to plenty of times herse
lf. Medicine, for the most part, was still a man’s world.

  “Sure thing, Dr. Layman,” Rudy said. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

  “What can I do to help?” she asked, hoping to make some kind of amends. This was not how she’d wanted to start her relationship with Zach Gibson, especially not with a witness as talkative as Rudy.

  “Nothing, ma’am.”

  She wished he wouldn’t call her that, but she could hardly ask him to call her Callie so soon, and insisting on being addressed as Dr. Layman would only add insult to injury at this point. “I want to help,” she said. “It’s my practice now,” she couldn’t stop herself from adding.

  Zach’s face hardened momentarily. “You don’t know where a bloody thing is yet, or where it goes.” His tone softened, probably when he remembered he was talking to his boss. “You’re soaking wet and covered with fiberglass. Go on over to the White Pine and get changed. Besides, Leola and Bonnie are on their way to lend a hand.” The two women, both of whom Callie knew from her childhood, were the clinic’s nurses and receptionist/bookkeepers, both essential to the efficient functioning of the practice. “Everything’s under control here, ma’am.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” she snapped before she could censure her words.

  “Yes, ma’am.” A corner of his mouth ticked up in what might have been a grin, but it was so fleeting Callie couldn’t be sure. “Go, Dr. Layman,” he said, the words just shy of being an outright command. “Let your dad and your new stepmother know you’re in town. Get yourself settled in and we’ll have this place ready for business on Monday morning.”

  So this was the way he wanted things to go. Where he continued to call the shots and she had no say in the decisions.

  Zach Gibson didn’t want her here; that was easy enough to figure out. The problem was...he was right. She would be more of a hindrance than a help to these people, who were used to working together as a team. She was the outsider. And the one thing she could never let any of them guess, especially her new PA, was that she was afraid she would never fit in.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THERE WAS NO PARKING space in front of the White Pine Bar and Grill, though Callie would have been surprised to find one on a Saturday evening in midsummer. She drove on by, turned left at the corner onto Perch Street, climbed the low hill, turned left again and angled her Jeep into the narrow gravel alleyway that ran behind the building. Her stepmother’s minivan was parked in the spot next to her dad’s SUV, but there was just enough space alongside the storage shed to park her car, if she didn’t ever need to open the passenger-side door.

  She wiggled out of the Jeep and brushed at the front of her slacks. The fiberglass had made her itchy, not to put too fine a point on it. She wanted a hot shower and a change of clothes. She tugged her overnight bag out of the car and headed toward the kitchen entrance. There was an outside stairway leading to the family quarters on the second floor but she didn’t have a key to the door at the top, so the back stairs through the kitchen was her only option. She just hoped the White Pine’s longtime head cook, Margaret McElroy—Mac to everyone who knew her—would be too busy to question Callie on her unexpected arrival and bedraggled appearance.

  She was in luck. As Callie entered, Mac, pushing sixty, wiry-haired, and as short and round as a fireplug, was haranguing her staff of college students and long-suffering grill cooks like the army drill sergeant she used to be. The high, screened windows, although open to the cooling evening breeze, did little to dispel the heat and humidity in the too-small room. The dishwasher was rumbling away, fire flared in the grill, and the smell of seared beef and hot grease caused Callie’s stomach to rumble. She hadn’t eaten since she left Ann Arbor and she suddenly realized just how hungry she was. The White Pine served great steaks, but what the restaurant was really famous for was the all-you-could-eat perch and bluegill dinners.

  She’d return to the kitchen for some of each as soon as she was clean and dry. She grabbed her duffel, holding it to her chest, and hurried up the steep, narrow stairs. In the days when the building was a hotel, the stairs would have been used by the maids to carry hot water to the patrons in the rooms above. Nowadays it led to a door that opened into the family kitchen she and her dad had seldom used. She hesitated for a moment before the closed door. Should she knock? After all, it really wasn’t her home anymore. It was her father’s—and Ginger’s. She was only a guest. She settled on a quick, light tap, the kind of combined warning and greeting you’d give anyone before you opened a closed door in a house. No response. She opened the door. The kitchen was empty. The light was on, since it was now almost nine and the windows faced away from the lake into the lower branches of the pines and maples on the hillside. Ginger hadn’t gotten around to changing much in the small, functional room beyond painting the old pine cabinets a creamy white and adding a colorful valance above the utilitarian white blinds on the windows. Although the changes were minimal, Callie had to admit the room was a lot more inviting than it had been in the past.

  “Hello, anybody home?” Callie called out. She didn’t really expect her dad or her stepmother to be here. They would be downstairs, her stepmother overseeing the dining-room operation and her dad behind the bar, where he still helped out during busy weekend evenings. But her stepsiblings might be hanging around. “Brandon? Becca?”

  Silence. Maybe the twins were busing tables. She’d been younger than they were when she’d started busing, under the less than enthusiastic supervision of her mother. Free-spirited and fun-loving, Karen Layman hadn’t wanted to work in the grill when her in-laws retired to Arizona, but business hadn’t been good enough to warrant the expense of another full-time employee. So Callie’s mother had reluctantly filled the role of manager until the long hours, tight money and long, cold winters she hated had drained all the joy from her life and her marriage.

  At least, that was what she’d told Callie when she’d taken off to rethink her priorities three weeks after Callie’s sixteenth birthday. From then on it had been just Callie and her dad...at least until a little over a year ago when Ginger Markwood had come into the White Pine inquiring about a job. She’d found not only employment but a place in J.R.’s heart. Now she was his wife, and her two children—three, soon—called Callie’s old home their own. The realization was more disturbing than she cared to admit.

  “Hey, kids? Anyone here?” Callie called out again, moving from the kitchen into the big, high-ceilinged great room that had once been a dormitory for male guests. A huge river-rock fireplace dominated the wall to her left, twin to the one in the dining room that helped make it so inviting. The three double-hung windows covered in long, sheer panels of voile that were currently moving in the breeze faced Lake Street and also had a view of the lake, as did the window in her bedroom. What had once been six smaller private rooms bisected by a hallway leading off the wall opposite the fireplace had now become a master suite and small bathroom on the hill side and three bedrooms along the lake side. Her old room, the first on the left, was above the foyer on the main floor, the others above the dining room. When she was little, Callie had often lain in bed and listened to the muffled sounds of laughter and low conversations and the chiming of silverware against the edge of a china plate downstairs.

  The living area with its worn, overstuffed leather furniture—she remembered what a production it had been to get it up the stairs—was empty, the TV turned off. She had the place to herself. The bar was directly below her but the ceiling had been soundproofed years before, so unless there was a live band playing on the occasional Saturday night, the room was as quiet as any other home’s main living area.

  She hurried into the hallway toward the bathroom. The itching was getting worse. She didn’t carry a black doctor’s bag in this day and age but she did have a very well-equipped first-aid kit in the Jeep and she’d transferred some cortisone-based skin cream to her duffel before
she came upstairs.

  A nice hot shower, clean hair, dry clothes, and relief from the itching on her feet and calves, and she’d be ready to face her new family. She opened the door of her bedroom and swung the heavy walnut panel inward. But it wasn’t her bedroom anymore. Gone were the pale pink rose-strewn sheers and matching comforter her mother had helped her pick out the year before she left. The walls were newly painted a cloudy gray, and the drapes at the windows were heavy and pleated and almost black, casting the room into shadows now that the sun had set. Her brass bed had been replaced by a futon with a blood-red throw scattered with half a dozen pillows in jewel tones. The walls were plastered with posters of dragons and gryphons, elves and sorceresses, and hard-muscled, broad-shouldered mystical warriors in armor and chain mail that oddly enough reminded Callie just a tiny bit of Zach Gibson as he’d been earlier, legs spread wide, wielding his shop vac instead of a magical sword.

  “Hey, what are you doing in my bedroom without permission?” a voice demanded. Callie gave a little yelp of surprise. Her new stepsister had come up behind Callie without her noticing and was standing in the hallway, hands on hips, her chin thrust out at a stubborn angle.

  Becca was not a pretty child. She was tall and reed thin with long, straight strawberry blond hair, freckles, and a nose that was too big and too sharp for her face. Someday she would grow out of this awkward stage and become a striking, if not classically beautiful, woman. But today, dressed in a pine-green T-shirt with the White Pine logo on the left breast pocket and khakis—the uniform of the restaurant’s waitstaff—she was just plain homely. Her expression was as belligerent as her tone of voice.