Jake had known he was playing with fire when he walked into the hardware store after Nora left town and asked the old folks to help him. He hated their meddling, but this was for Nora. He’d suspected—and he’d been right—that they’d jump at the opportunity to help her.
“What’s everyone doing here?” Nora asked as Clara approached from where she’d been camped out behind the reception desk with Wynd and Amber.
“We’re your temps,” Clara said.
Jake had also known he was playing with fire when he went from the hardware store to the inn to see if Clara was interested in earning some extra cash over her winter break. But Sawyer was already onto him. And even if that hadn’t been the case, this was important. Clara was probably a pretty reliable bet when it came to quickly learning complicated software.
Anyway, sometimes you had to do what you had to do, damn the consequences.
“What do you mean you’re my temps?” Nora asked. Everyone looked at him, but he gestured back to Clara.
“Wynd is teaching me your software for scheduling and billing, and I’m going to be your receptionist until I have to go back to school in the new year. Hopefully you can hire someone permanently by then.”
“And I’m backup for when Clara’s busy with her girlfriend from Toronto,” said Eiko with a twinkle in her eye.
“What?” Clara’s jaw dropped, and Jake sighed. These people were impossible.
“Oh, come on,” Eiko said. “Everyone knows your ‘friend’ who’s coming to visit for New Year’s isn’t your ‘friend’ at all.”
“I am going to kill my brother,” Clara said.
“Well, I’m sure you thought—”
Jake cleared his throat to draw Eiko’s attention and shook his head at her. Clara had only come out a year and a half ago, and as far as Jake knew, her holiday visitor was her first girlfriend. Honestly, there should be an age limit on the meddling the old folks did.
“Anyway,” Eiko said, “I don’t know about fancy software, but I can answer phones like nobody’s business. I started my career in the 1960s as the secretary to the publisher of a newspaper. So whenever Clara can’t be here, I can.”
“I figure if someone prints the schedule on paper, she can handwrite in any appointments she makes, and Clara can enter them later,” said Wynd from behind the reception desk.
“And I,” said Pearl, “did some digging. The Clinton campus of Fanshawe College has a health care admin program. They’ll have new grads at the end of the semester.”
“Wow.” Nora had started blinking rapidly. “Wow.”
“And if that doesn’t work out, I can fill in, too,” Pearl said. “I mean, I am the two-time Fortnite champ in Senior Gamers of Southwestern Ontario, so how hard can medical billing really be?”
“And I can handle communicating with pharmacies,” Amber said. “I help Wynd with it anyway when she gets busy.”
Suddenly Nora’s blinking looked like it was about to turn into blinking back tears.
“She just got here,” Jake said, pushing through the crowd of women. “Let her put her stuff in her office and take her coat off before you all bombard her.”
He grabbed her shoulder bag and started steering her toward her office.
“Thank you, everyone!” she called over her shoulder. “I should have said that right off, but I’m a little overwhelmed.”
“Don’t thank us,” Eiko called back. “Thank Jake. It was all his idea.”
He delivered her to the door of her office intending to leave her there, but she grabbed his arm, pulled him in with her, shut the door, and threw herself into his arms.
Her parka was so puffy, it was like hugging a marshmallow, but he’d missed his marshmallow over the weekend, so he went all in.
“Jake. I—”
Her voice was muffled by his chest. He reluctantly let go of her so he could hear her.
She looked startled—like, really startled. By the clinic still? He supposed it was a lot to take in. She looked at him a long time.
“You okay, Doc?”
I love you.
Thank God she hadn’t said it out loud.
Because she didn’t mean it like that. She’d just been so overwhelmed and relieved to find that Jake had solved her clinic problem. She meant it in the way you say, “I love you” when someone surprises you with something that makes your life easier or more delightful or when someone generally saves your ass when your ass did not expect saving.
Like last week, when she’d gotten a pizza to go from Law’s and walked to Maya’s with it. Maya had buzzed her up, swung open her door, taken one look at the telltale pizza box, and said, “I love you.”
That was it. She didn’t love-love Jake; she loved the way he made her life easier.
He also provided an interesting study in contrasts. Rufus had made everything harder. She hadn’t realized it when she was in it, but it was true. Rufus was forever asking her to cover his shifts, which required her to cancel haircuts and coffee dates with her sister. He would insist they overshoot the movie theater a few blocks from them in favor of one a half-hour subway ride away because he liked the screens there better. She got it—or at least that was what she’d told herself. He cared about things like movie screens. She didn’t, and it didn’t hurt her to accommodate him, she had always reasoned.
And maybe it hadn’t hurt her, but the little sacrifices had added up. The accommodations had accumulated until she’d forgotten what it was like for someone to have your back. What easy felt like.
Easy felt like such a relief.
“You okay, Doc?” Jake sounded concerned. She was being weird, and he was picking up on it.
“Yeah, yeah. Thank you for this.”
“Eh, all I did was some wrangling.”
Yeah, right. She knew full well he was the silent mastermind behind all of this, but she also knew he wouldn’t want her to make a big deal out of it. “Well, thanks for the wrangling.”
The week passed remarkably uneventfully. With Wynd still there and Nora’s new army of helpers cycling in and out, everything was extra efficient. When the weekend came, she opted not to go back to Toronto. Her grandma had seemed stable the previous weekend. They were only open one more week, and then she’d take off for her previously scheduled holiday break.
Mostly she just wanted to catch her breath. Be still for a day or two—no work, no travel. Do some online Christmas shopping. Hang out with her dog. And maybe her pal the man-god.
“Hey, so sorry I’m late.” Wynd rushed in. Their usual Friday-morning staff meeting was winding down. “There’s terrible black ice out there. I just about bit it twice.”
“Honey, you have to be careful,” Eiko said.
“You know what?” Nora was feeling magnanimous. “If you want to just be done, I think we’re on top of things enough that we can do without you next week.”
“Really?” Wynd asked hopefully.
“I think so. Don’t you?” She looked around at Clara, Eiko, and Jake. Yes, Jake. Even though he had no official role in the clinic’s operations, he tended to stop by in the mornings to make sure everything was looking okay for the day ahead. He had even done a stint behind the reception desk at one point when Wynd had gone home early because of a storm, Clara wasn’t around, and Eiko had to run off to cover the annual Polar Bear Dip in the bay.
Nora had come out from an appointment to find Mr. Not Much of a Phone Guy on the phone.
“Just because I don’t like talking on the phone doesn’t mean I don’t know how to do it,” he’d said when she’d razzed him. He slid a stack of messages toward her. “And I am literate, you know.”
“Yeah, we’ll miss you, but we’ll be fine,” Clara said to Wynd. The members of Nora’s misfit medical admin team all nodded in agreement.
And they were fine.
The next week presented a few minor problems, but everyone seemed to regard tackling them as a team effort. Patients got seen, even if things ran late. Appointments got made,
even if people had to be called back later. Nora stayed late Monday evening to deal with the billing, which was okay, because Jake appeared bearing Hawaiian pizza and Mick.
They ate. And then they locked Mick out of her office.
They did it all over again on Tuesday.
The week was going great. And not just because of the locking-Mick-out-of-the-office part. In spite of the hiccups they’d encountered, she was full of gratitude toward everyone who was helping her out. Eiko and Clara and Jake, of course, but also Pearl, who was constantly showing up with pies. And Sawyer, who popped in from time to time to see if anyone needed anything. And Maya and Eve, who brought her dinner on Wednesday night, when Jake was at a job.
Even her patients were cheerful about longer-than-usual delays on hold or in the waiting room.
It felt like the whole town was coming together to support the clinic. To support her.
By Thursday things were humming along. Nora had a stack of résumés to look over for a permanent hire and an idea brewing to hire Clara this coming summer—if she was interested—to help her be more organized with her vaccine projects.
All was well.
When Nora came out of an exam room midafternoon, Eiko was waiting for her. “Your sister is on line one. I told her you were in with a patient and you’d call her back, but she wanted to hold.”
Nora picked up the call in her office. “Hey! Did you guys get the tree up? I’m not going to be able to get out of here until about four tomorrow, so don’t wait, but I’ll—”
“Nora.”
She knew, just from the one word, from the way Erin said her name. But she asked anyway. She wanted to be wrong. “What happened?”
“It’s Grandma.”
Oh, shit.
“She’s much worse. We took her to the emergency room this morning because she was…” Erin’s voice wavered before she regained control of it. “She was having a lot of trouble breathing. They admitted her. She’s on oxygen, but she’s getting all weirdly intense about making sure everyone knows about her DNR wishes.”
“I’m going to get there as soon as I can.”
“Now?”
This was the downside of the single-physician practice. She had been high lately on the feeling that she personally was making a difference in the lives of people in this town, that she had built something from nothing.
But it also meant that she personally was responsible for her patients. There was no getting someone to cover her shifts.
“As soon as I can.” She had patients in the waiting room. She probably had one in each of her two exam rooms, too. Maybe if she just got through today, she could have Amber call everyone on the schedule for tomorrow and shuffle things around so the people who couldn’t wait came first thing, and then she could be on the road before lunch?
“Nora. Come as soon as you can. Please.”
After assuring Erin she would, she rose and walked out of her office feeling like she was floating outside her body.
Eiko was waiting in the corridor. “What’s happened?”
“Nothing. I—”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Dr. Hon, but I once broke a story about the previous town council conspiring to siphon funds from the lighthouse rehabilitation fund. You can’t fool me.”
“My grandma’s in the hospital. It looks like this is it.”
“Oh no. I’m sorry.”
Nora was about to brush off Eiko’s words. Well meant as they were, she didn’t want them. But Eiko was on to other things. She rapped sharply on the door of Exam Room Two. “Amber, can you step out for a minute?”
“What’s up?”
“Nora’s grandma is in the hospital in Toronto, and Nora needs to leave.”
“Yes, if we can get through the rest of the day,” Nora said, noting with amazement how calm her voice sounded, “I was thinking we could—”
“No. You go now.”
“I can’t just leave!” So much for calm. “There are patients here! We have a full schedule tomorrow.”
“We’ll take care of it,” Eiko said. “Go home, pack some stuff up, and hit the road.”
“What do you mean you’ll take care of it? You can’t—”
“We can,” Amber said with the quiet sureness that made her such a good nurse. “We’ll call everyone who’s on the books for the rest of today and tomorrow and either reschedule them for after the holidays or, if it’s urgent, send them to the walk-in clinic in Grand View. I can be here tomorrow in case there’s anyone we can’t reach. I obviously can’t see them, but I can triage and either rebook them for January or send them elsewhere. And I can do that right now with the people in the waiting room.”
“Are you sure?”
“Dr. Hon.” Eiko emerged from Nora’s office holding Nora’s coat and bag. “We lived without you before. It wasn’t pleasant, mind you, and we all like it a lot better with you here, but we can do it again. So just go see your grandma.”
Her things were shoved unceremoniously into her arms.
“Okay,” Nora said weakly. “Thank you.”
“I’ll call your sister back and let her know you’re leaving shortly,” Eiko said.
“Thanks,” Nora said again.
“And if there’s anything else we can do, you let us know.”
“Could you let Jake know what’s happened and ask him to keep Mick?” It was a stupid request. Jake was already keeping Mick. Mick was, at this point, more Jake’s dog than Nora’s, if you went by how much time he spent with each of them. Or the way he trotted along obediently after Mr. Dog Whisperer.
But she…just wanted Jake to know what had happened. It felt important that he know.
Chapter Seventeen
The day after Christmas, Jake bought a cell phone.
Because he had lost his mind.
“Are you going to tell Sawyer about this?” he asked Clara, who was sitting next to him in the shuttered clinic using her phone to order him a phone.
Honestly, the modern world made his head hurt sometimes.
She shot him a quizzical look. “Would you prefer I didn’t?”
He wasn’t sure how to play this. Was she teasing him? He decided to just be honest. “Yes. I would prefer you didn’t.”
“So you’re just going to have a secret phone that no one knows about?”
“I’m going to use it for weather reports when I’m out on the boat, but I don’t want to make myself available all the time, you know?”
Except to one person.
God. Nora’s continued absence was gutting him.
If only he knew her goddamn number, he could call her from his landline. But he didn’t, and there was no way to get it without asking Eve or Maya or someone. Which he still might do. He just wasn’t quite that desperate yet.
He had asked Eve once how she was doing, but there wasn’t much news. “Sounds like she isn’t doing well but is still hanging on,” she’d said, as if that were specific enough. As if that told him anything of use.
And anyway, he wanted to know how Nora was doing. The “she” in his question had meant Nora.
“You might actually be onto something with that,” Clara said. “I’m starting to think my phone is affecting my brain, and not in a good way. You want Android or iOS?”
“I have no idea what those words even mean.”
“If budget is a primary concern, I’d say Android. But since—don’t take this the wrong way—you’re kind of a beginner, I’m going to say we should go with an iPhone. It’s more intuitive.”
“Just get me a phone.” He winced. That had come out way too sharply. She hadn’t done anything but help him. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay, Jake.” She smiled affectionately at him. “I’m not going to tell Sawyer.”
“Why not?” He wasn’t sure why he was asking. He shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
“Honestly?” she said as she tapped away at her phone. “Because you’re one of the only people in this town who isn�
�t giving me shit about Sunnie.”
“People are giving you shit about Sunnie? What people?”
“Calm down. Not like that. Just, you know the way everyone in this town acts. They’re being all wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Like, I just met the girl a few months ago. She’s my first girlfriend. Meanwhile, Pearl has started emailing me pictures of wedding cake toppers with two brides. Even Sawyer is being kind of weird.”
“Yeah, I can’t help you there. I don’t know how to make Pearl not be Pearl or make Sawyer not be weird.”
“I mean, I get it. It’s hard to be from Moonflower Bay and not let all this nosiness rub off on you. But why do people have to verbalize every thought in their head?”
“I ask myself that every day.”
“Like, for example, even if I suspect that your suddenly buying a phone is related to your massive crush on Dr. Walsh, that doesn’t mean I need to say it out loud.”
He was tempted to protest. But what was the point? Clara was just a kid. She wouldn’t understand the concept of friends with benefits. And the relevant point was that she wasn’t going to tell Sawyer, who also, it seemed, didn’t understand the concept of friends with benefits. So he returned the conversation to an earlier topic: “If anyone gives you shit—like actual shit about who you are—you let me know, okay?” People didn’t just mess with Clara Collins.
She smiled. “Thanks, Jake. I mean, my brother is a cop and all, so I don’t think I’m going to need to tap you for vigilante justice purposes, but I totally appreciate that I could. Now hand over your credit card so we can buy you a phone you’re going to use to check the weather for all that fishing you don’t do.”
Grandma was slipping away. Every day she was awake less—overall and at each interval. And when she was awake, she was starting, sometimes, not to know where she was, or what year it was.
“You should think of medical school,” she said to Nora on the morning of Christmas eve, reaching out and flailing her hand. Nora grabbed the hand in her own. Her grandma’s skin was thin and crepey and pale and studded with a line that was delivering fluids and meds.
Paradise Cove Page 21
