The Doughnut Fix Series, Book 1

by Jessie Janowitz

  “Dad!” I’d yell.

  “Oh, was that me?” he’d say. Again.

  It took forever, but we did finally make it to the bottom, and somehow, even with all the crashing into trees, I was pretty sure none of my ribs were broken, and we hadn’t wrecked the bike or the buggy, though neither looked brand-new anymore.

  “Okay, get in,” I said when we’d wheeled the bike and buggy out onto the road.

  “Where?” Dad said.

  “Here.” I held open the zippered flap on the buggy.

  Dad snorted a laugh. “Absolutely not.”

  “It’s the only way,” Jeanine said.

  “Why can’t I bike?”

  “Because…because…you just can’t! Now get in. And put this on your head.” Jeanine handed him back the ice pack.

  Dad stuck out his lips just like Zoe does when my parents yell at her, but he held the ice to his head anyway and said, “Fine.” Then he turned his back to the buggy and lowered himself into it, leaving his feet still out on the road.

  “We need all of you in there,” I said.

  “What do you suggest I do with these?” he said, kicking his legs straight out.

  “They fold, don’t they? Fold them.” I picked up his legs one by one and put them inside the buggy. “See, no problem.”

  “Oh, yeah. This is great.” Dad rolled his eyes.

  I’m not going to lie. It didn’t look comfortable. And, for sure, if we hit a bump, his kneecap would give him a nosebleed, but at least all he had to do was sit there.

  Jeanine and I were just about to get on the bike when I realized she was still wearing her bathrobe. “Take off the robe.”

  “But it’s cold, and I only have on pj’s.”

  “You’ll warm up on the bike.”

  “I can’t ride into town in pj’s,” she said, as if two kids on a tandem bike pulling their six-foot father in a baby buggy wouldn’t give people enough to talk about.

  “How is your bathrobe better than pj’s?”

  “It kind of looks like a coat. People won’t be able to tell it’s a robe.”

  “Uh, they will if they’re not blind. Look, it could get caught. It’s dangerous.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. Why don’t you ever believe me about anything? I know I’m not a genius, but I’m not stupid. I do know some useful things.”

  “Fine.” Jeanine took off the robe and stuffed it into the buggy. “It’s freezing.”

  I put a leg over the bike and held it up while Jeanine climbed on behind me. Then I pushed off.

  I was expecting to feel super wobbly at least at first, but the bike felt pretty balanced.

  “I like this,” Jeanine called from behind. “It’s kind of fun.”

  Just then, the bike swerved, and I had to lean way out to keep it from falling over. “Jeanine!”

  “Sorry. I was just trying to get more comfortable.”

  “Don’t move. I mean, just move your legs. Not anything else.”

  Usually when I’m riding to town, I get on and just go. I don’t even have to think about turning the pedals over. But this was different. This felt like work, and we weren’t even on a hill yet.

  Then I looked down and realized why I was working so hard. Jeanine’s boots were going around, but when the pedals dropped, I could see the ground between the pedal and the boot. She wasn’t pushing at all. Her feet were just along for the ride. “Jeanine! Pedal!”

  “I am.”

  “No, you’re not. Your feet are on a merry-go-round. They need to push. C’mon. Right. Left. Right. Left.”

  “But that’s hard,” she whined.

  “It’s called riding a bike.” I stood up on the pedals.

  “Why are you doing that?”

  “You get more power like this. But just sit. It’ll be too hard to balance with both of us standing.”

  When the road flattened out, I sat back down. My back was killing me, and I was breathing hard.

  “Are we almost there?”

  “Can you please just pedal?” I was too out of breath to talk.

  Jeanine was quiet for a while after that, and she was definitely pushing the pedals down now because I could hear her puffing behind me.

  “I don’t like this!” she shouted as we started to pick up speed heading down a long hill.

  “I can’t do anything about gravity, Jeanine.”

  “Can’t you slow us down?”

  “We’re not even going that fast. Just relax.”

  But Jeanine didn’t relax. Instead, Jeanine did what Jeanine does. She freaked, and the bike began to dip and swerve like it was trying to shake me off.

  “Okay! Okay!” I slowed us down until the screaming and the swooping stopped. “Better?”

  “Better.”

  Since even with Jeanine actually pedaling, we had no chance of making it up the monster hill outside of town, I stopped at the bottom of it. I’d planned on picking Jeanine and Dad up at the traffic light at the top, but once he was out of the buggy, Dad swore he’d never get back in, so I rode all the way to the clinic and waited for them there.

  “Hello? Anybody here?” Jeanine called as we entered the empty waiting room.

  Besides some armchairs and a coffee table, it didn’t look much like other waiting rooms I’d seen. The walls were crowded with colorful paintings from floor to ceiling, and there was no window with a receptionist sitting in it.

  “Hey! Just come on up,” a man’s voice called.

  “Up?” I called back.

  It seemed weird to have a doctor’s office on more than one floor. If someone were really sick, would you want to make them climb a flight of stairs?

  “Yeah, come up!” the man said again.

  “I’ll go,” I said and left Jeanine quizzing Dad on U.S. capitals in the waiting room. These he remembered perfectly, at least according to Jeanine. I couldn’t tell you since I’ve taken a stand against memorizing facts readily available on the internet.

  “Perfect timing. I need another pair of hands,” I heard the man say as I climbed the stairs.

  Was it possible that Petersville was so short on able bodies that the doctor let just anybody pitch in to help with surgical procedures? My stomach somersaulted like I was in an elevator coming down too fast. I’m not so good with blood, mine or anybody else’s.

  What I saw when I got up there did make me want to run back down again, but it wasn’t some lady having a wart sawed off. It was a man, super thin, dripping with sweat and wearing way too little clothing to be inviting in visitors. The only thing separating him from complete nakedness were those teeny, tiny running shorts. You know the ones that are so small you’re worried something will fall out? Those.

  The man held a paintbrush in each hand, and he was going at an enormous canvas like he was trying to teach it a lesson. It must have been fighting back too, because the thick carpet of hair on his chest was more blue than gray.

  Before I could ask where the doctor was, the guy was rushing at me, shoving a long piece of cardboard into my hands, and then pulling me by it back over to the painting. “Here, just hold it like this,” he said, pressing it against the canvas at an angle.

  “But—”

  “Shush! Quiet!” he ordered, raising his paintbrush over his mouth so fast, he splattered both our faces with paint. Then he began painting furiously around the cardboard, covering not just the canvas but both my hands with cold, syrupy paint.

  “But—”

  “Shush!”

  “It’s just—”

  “Please, please, please! This will only take one minute, sixty seconds, nothing.”

  Okay, sixty seconds is nothing, but it was so not sixty. I counted. Somewhere after 200 Mississippi, I let the cardboard drop.

  “Oh no,” he said, more s
ad than angry. “I was almost done.”

  “Look,” I said. “I really need to find Dr. Charney.”

  “You’re not Joe?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not here about the painting apprenticeship?”

  “No, I’m here to see the doctor.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?” he said, tossing his paintbrushes into a coffee can. I must have looked annoyed because then he said, “Kidding,” and knocked me a little too hard on the shoulder with a blue fist. “Just give me a second.”

  This guy was the doctor? Maybe “doctor” meant something different in Petersville.

  “Fever?” He went to a sink in the corner of the room and began washing his hands. “Flu’s already making the rounds. Have you been vaccinated?”

  He spoke Doctor at least. “Uh, no. It’s not me. It’s my dad. Downstairs. He fell off our roof. We think he has a concussion.”

  “I’m sure Dad’s just fine, but let’s go take a look,” he said, drying his hands as he headed for the stairs.

  “Um, aren’t you forgetting something?” I tugged at my sweatshirt. Personally, I thought he could have used a shower too given all the paint and sweat, but the least he could do was put on some clothes.

  “Right, back in a flash.” He dashed behind a screen that hid a corner of the room. As I waited, I looked around the large, messy space, which, in addition to artist studio, was part kitchen, living room, office, and tool shop.

  A minute later, he popped out from behind the screen in a white lab coat, tufts of blue chest hair peeking out above the collar. “Ready!”

  I guess he thought, like the shower, a shirt was optional. I couldn’t help wondering if he even had underwear on under there. Just the thought skeeved me out so much I couldn’t look at him.

  “I run hot,” he said like he could hear what I was thinking.

  “Oh,” I said, and hurried down the stairs, trying not to think about whether what he’d just told me was, “No, I’m not wearing anything under this lab coat.” It wasn’t till I got to the bottom that I noticed he was still barefoot.

  Not surprisingly, Jeanine insisted on interrogating Dr. Charney before she let him touch Dad. And I have to admit, it was one of those times that I was happy Jeanine is so Jeanine.

  First, she demanded to know why Dr. Charney didn’t have a receptionist like a real doctor. Was it because he didn’t actually have any patients?

  Not having a receptionist meant he could charge people less for seeing him, he explained. Then he picked up a date book from the coffee table and showed her how people came into the clinic and penciled in their own appointments. This actually seemed really smart to me. If it did to Jeanine too, she didn’t let on.

  Next, Jeanine wanted to know why Dr. Charney wasn’t seeing patients that day, a weekday.

  Because, he explained, he took Thursdays off and saw patients on Saturdays so they wouldn’t have to take off work.

  “What a great idea!” Dad said.

  Jeanine was still not satisfied.

  Finally, Jeanine asked about the doctor’s school degrees. Dr. Barber, our pediatrician, had a wall in his waiting room covered with framed degrees and covers of magazines that named him one of the best doctors in New York City. “Where are yours?” she asked.

  Dr. Charney screwed up his mouth, then walked out of the waiting room.

  Jeanine and I exchanged looks. Was he coming back? Was this the question fast-talking Dr. Charney didn’t have an answer to? This wasn’t entirely good news since an artist pretending to be a doctor was still better than no doctor at all. I was just beginning to wonder what we should do now when Dr. Charney marched back in, two yellowed sheets of paper held high. “Found them!” he said with a big smile and handed them to Jeanine.

  Her eyes bulged.

  “Happy now?” he said.

  “You went to Yale? Did you know that five U.S. Presidents went to Yale?”

  “I am aware,” Dr. Charney said.

  “So why don’t you have these out here on the wall where people can see them?”

  He held up the papers and studied them. “Not really much to look at, are they? Besides, then there would be less room for these,” he said, pointing to his paintings.

  By the time Dr. Charney was finally permitted to examine him, my father had started to get his memory back. He could now remember that we’d told him he’d fallen off the roof, which seemed like a good sign even if he couldn’t remember the fall itself. Either way, Dr. C was sure he hadn’t had a stroke. Just to be safe though, he wanted Mom to take him for a CAT scan. So when she and Zoe finally got to Petersville an hour after we’d called her from the doctor’s office, she had to turn around and drive right back to Crellin with Dad. Josh’s mom said we could stay with her and Josh at the library till they got back.

  The first thing Jeanine did when we got to the library was sit down at the computer and google Dr. Z. Charney. There were so many hits, I was sure they couldn’t all be him. The first was an Amazon link. Jeanine clicked on it.

  A photo of a smiling man holding a book called Hometown Healing: Breaking All the Rules popped up. He was wearing way more clothing than I would have bet the man I’d just met would ever wear—shirt, tie, and blazer—but there was no denying it was him. Under the photo, it said the book was about being a doctor in small towns where most people don’t have much money and few have health insurance. It also said that the author had practiced medicine in small towns all over the country before settling in Petersville, New York.

  The next hits were all articles about the book and the awards it had won. About halfway down the first page though, the results changed. They weren’t about Dr. Z. Charney anymore, but someone named Zed Charney, painter.

  “No way,” I said. “Find a photo.”

  It took some clicking, but there, on some art gallery site in a photo of a party celebrating his new exhibition in Seattle was Dr. C, wearing a shirt open to his belly button, the chest hair I was becoming way too familiar with out there for everyone with an internet connection to see.

  “Mom told me that this new museum in Spain just bought two of his paintings,” said Josh, who’d joined us at the computer.

  I couldn’t remember seeing Jeanine so impressed by anyone living since she’d learned about some kid who’d figured out that the federal government could save millions of dollars each year if it just changed the font it used when it printed stuff.

  I was blown away too. I’d never met someone like Dr. C, not just someone who’d done as much as he had, but someone who’d done all that stuff and didn’t even go around telling everyone he had.

  By the rules Zane Kramer, and now Charlie too, believed the world worked, Dr. Charney simply couldn’t exist. What he’d done, who he was, none of it was possible.

  But it was. And Dr. C was living, breathing proof.

  “Hey, what’s that?” Josh said, pointing to the dish towel sack I was still carrying around.

  “Oh, right.” I’d completely forgotten. There was still one cake left, so I told Josh it was something I owed Winnie and I’d explain after I went to the General Store to give it to her.

  • • •

  “What’s this?” Winnie said when I untied the dish towel and set the cake on the counter. “Looks like somebody put their fist through it.”

  “We had some bike trouble. It’ll still taste good. Do you have a microwave so we can zap it for a few seconds? It’s better warm.”

  “Radiation makes it tastes better? How ’bout mercury? That make it taste better too? Maybe I have some asbestos we could shake over it like powdered sugar?”

  “Never mind,” I said. It would still taste good. The chocolate center just wouldn’t pack the same ooze. Her loss.

  Winnie leaned over and sniffed. “What is it anyway?”

  “Molten chocola
te cake.”

  “Just chocolate, right? I don’t like it when people get all fancy and mix the chocolate up with stuff that’s got no business with chocolate. Some guy came in here trying to sell me chocolate bars with chili peppers in them. What’s that about?”

  Clearly I was getting points for chocolate. That was something at least.

  “I know,” I said. “My parents took us to this fancy restaurant once that put lavender in the chocolate mousse. It was like eating that dried stuff people use to make clothes smell good.”

  “Potpourri in chocolate? An abomination, that’s what that is.”

  I didn’t know what an abomination was, but she seemed to be agreeing with me, which felt like a good sign. “Yeah, don’t worry. This is just chocolate and eggs and butter and sugar. It’s my mom’s famous recipe.”

  “Famous, huh? Did they write about it in the papers?” She pointed to the frame on the counter.

  “I just meant people love it.” How was it that every other word out of my mouth got her all worked up? Worked up wasn’t a good way to go into a taste test.

  “Well, I’m not everyone,” she muttered as she disappeared into the back of the store. Moments later, she was back, fork in hand. “Just chocolate, right?” She jabbed the cake like she was trying to wake it up.

  “Just chocolate, I promise.”

  “Okay, here we go…”

  I tried to read her face as she chewed.

  “Didn’t anybody ever tell you it’s rude to watch a person eat?”

  “Sorry.” I turned around and pretended to study the egg cartons.

  “Hmn,” she grunted.

  I snuck a quick look just in time to see her take another bite, much bigger than the first.

  “Not earth-shattering or anything,” she said, still chewing, “but you should be able to make my doughnuts okay.”

  “Yes!” I spun around to face her.

  “Not so fast,” she said, wagging her fork at me. “Before you get that recipe, we need to hammer out the details. You bring your business plan?”