A Second Chance for the Single Dad

by Marie Ferrarella

  She took another mouthful of ice cream, hoping it would console her. But it didn’t.

  “Wonderful,” she murmured, licking the spoon clean before sinking it into the container again. “Thirty-two years old and I’m sitting in the middle of my kitchen swallowing empty calories, getting fat and spouting philosophy to a pint of rum raisin ice cream,” she said critically, shaking her head. “I really hope this isn’t a sign of things to come.”

  Just then the phone rang again. Turning her head toward the sound, she debated letting the answering machine pick up the caller. She just knew it was her godmother calling her back with another suggestion. She really wasn’t in the mood for another pep talk.

  It was the kind of thing that Maizie did. Her godmother wouldn’t rest until she got Kayley to either agree to come over or invite Maizie to come to her mother’s house.

  Her house now, Kayley corrected. Lord, it was hard to think of it that way.

  The phone continued to ring.

  Kayley pressed her lips together, frustrated. But ignoring the phone and letting the machine pick up was rude and she knew it. And the last person she wanted to be rude to was her godmother since Aunt Maizie had been so good to her. Most kids lost contact with their godmothers by the time they were five or six but Maizie had always been there for her, one way or another. Being rude was no way to pay Maizie back and the woman knew she was home right now.

  With a sigh, Kayley momentarily abandoned the dwindling pint of ice cream, leaving it on the kitchen table as she hurried over to the phone.

  “Really, I’m fine, Aunt Maizie,” she told her godmother the moment she picked up the receiver. “You don’t need to keep calling to check up on me.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and then she heard a distant-sounding male voice say, “I’m not Aunt Maizie, but I’m glad you’re fine.”

  Dr. Dolan? It couldn’t be.

  And yet...

  Her fingers had gone slack and the receiver almost slipped out of her hand. Getting a better grip on it, Kayley fumbled with an apology. “I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else—”

  There was just the slightest hint of a laugh. Or maybe it qualified as only a dismissive chuckle.

  “Obviously,” the deep voice said.

  Her heart was fluttering like a hummingbird.

  “Who is this?” she asked uncertainly, although a part of her thought she already knew who it was—but that was probably just wishful thinking on her part.

  Nobody called back this fast—unless it was to put her out of her misery by delivering the bad news quickly and cleanly.

  Was he calling to do that?

  “I’m sorry—let’s start over,” the man on the other end of the line said. “This is Dr. Dolan. I’m calling to speak to a Ms. Kayley Quartermain. Is this a number where I can reach her? I’ve already tried the cell phone number on her résumé, but I can’t get through to leave a message on her voice mail.”

  Kayley closed her eyes.

  Idiot!

  She had to remember to recharge her phone. The battery kept draining and this had to be the third time this week that this had happened, she thought, flustered that she’d committed such a birdbrained oversight.

  “Oh, Dr. Dolan, I’m so sorry. This is Kayley Quartermain. My cell phone’s old and it has trouble holding a charge for more than a couple of hours. It probably died, which is why you couldn’t get through.”

  To her relief, the surgeon took the information in stride. “If that’s the case, you might want to look into getting a new cell phone.”

  “I will,” she quickly agreed. “But I’ve been kind of busy with other things.” When he didn’t say anything to that, she asked, “Um, is there anything I can help you with?”

  He’d probably thought of another question he wanted to ask her. There was no reason for her to get her hopes up. If they were up, they only had that much farther to fall.

  Even so, she caught herself crossing her fingers as she waited for the doctor to say something.

  “As a matter of fact, there is. How soon can you come in?”

  “For another interview?” she asked, not knowing what to make of this.

  “You’re not being vetted to run for president, Ms. Quartermain,” he informed her. “I don’t need to conduct another interview. I made a call and talked to the last doctor you worked with. He told me he was very pleased with your work and he wanted to know if there was any way you’d consider coming back.” And then he caught her completely by surprise by asking, “Is there?”

  “No,” Kayley answered, trying to be diplomatic. “I enjoyed my time there and Dr. Andrews was great to work with, but as I told you, Bedford is home and right now I need to feel like I’m home.” She paused for a moment. “Is there anything else?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, there is. You still haven’t answered my first question,” he told her. “How soon can you come in? And I mean to work.”

  The hummingbirds began to crash into one another in her chest. “Is now too soon?”

  “We’re closed now,” he said.

  “Tomorrow, then.” She saw no point in attempting to hide her eagerness.

  “Tomorrow,” he agreed. “Come in at eight. We’ll go over the rules and there’s paperwork to fill out.” And with that, he hung up.

  “Yay!” With a laugh, Kayley threw out what was now incredibly soupy rum raisin, then went to call Maizie with the good news.

  Chapter Four

  Since returning to the Orthopedic Medical Group, Luke had taken to being the first one in each morning.

  Although no specific arrangements had been made regarding this practice, he became the one who usually unlocked the office doors. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to get a jump start on the day as he was there to avoid being at home with Lily.

  Not that he didn’t love his daughter. He loved her a great deal. But he had no idea how to talk to her or how to relate to someone who came up to his belt buckle and with whom he had nothing in common except for the blood that ran through their veins.

  He used work as his excuse for getting away. Work was also his excuse for not dealing with the terrible hollow emptiness he felt because Jill was no longer there to act as his go-between.

  In addition, being the first in and opening up the office at that time guaranteed Luke at least twenty, possibly thirty, minutes alone. Because his field of expertise ran in a different direction, when he came in, he couldn’t get the coffee machine up and running to provide that vital first cup of coffee in the morning. But there was a coffee shop half a block from the medical building and he stopped there first for his daily strong shot of caffeine.

  After walking in through the electronic doors, he took the elevator up the single floor and got out. He wasn’t prepared to find anyone standing by the locked double doors, waiting.

  But there she was, bright eyed and smiling, the woman he had hired the day before. The woman he wasn’t 100 percent certain he should have hired the day before. But he’d been without a physician’s assistant of his own since he’d rejoined the medical group, and while he had a tendency to be oblivious to certain kinds of day-to-day details, even he noticed that Rachel, the physician’s assistant he was presently sharing with one of his colleagues, looked a little worn around the edges.

  As a rule, Luke valued punctuality, but turning up at this hour went far beyond that.

  He nodded at his new PA in acknowledgment. “You’re here early,” he commented as he took out his keys and unlocked the main office doors. “I thought we agreed that you’d be here at eight.”

  Holding the doors open, he waited for her to walk in first.

  “We did,” Kayley replied, entering the office. The large reception area was almost eerily quiet. “But I didn’t want to ta
ke a chance on the morning traffic being heavy and making me late for my first day.”

  Well, he supposed that was admirable. “What time did you get here?” he asked.

  She thought of saying that she wasn’t sure, but that would be lying. So she told him the truth, even though it would probably make her seem neurotic in his eyes. “Seven.”

  Luke glanced at his watch, although he more or less knew what time it was. Seven thirty. So much for his half hour of solitude, he thought, switching the lights on for the entire floor.

  “You’re going to have to wait for the office manager to get in,” he told her. “She’s the one who knows which papers you need to fill out.”

  “That’s fine—I understand,” she said cheerfully. “I can wait. Is there anything you’d like me to do while I’m waiting?”

  Luke hadn’t a clue what she was implying, but his mind had a propensity to suggest the worst-case scenario. “Like what?”

  She thought of her old office. First thing in the morning, life had been clustered around the coffee machine.

  “If you have a coffee machine, I can get the coffee going, if you’d like,” she offered.

  Luke looked down at the container he had gotten at the coffee shop. “I brought my own,” he told her. “But I usually drink more than one cup. And I’m sure everyone else would appreciate starting their day with some hot coffee.”

  She smiled at him in response. Despite his natural inclination to keep barriers between himself and anyone he interacted with, Luke couldn’t help noticing that she had the same kind of smile his daughter had. It was the kind that seemed to light up everything around her.

  “Sounds good,” Kayley said. “Point me to the coffeemaker.”

  He paused right outside his own office, which was still closed. “Go straight down that hallway, then turn right at the first opening. The coffeemaker is in the break room. By the time you finish with it, Delia should be in.”

  She was unfamiliar with the name, since she had met with only him and Rachel, the physician’s assistant who had looked so relieved that she was interviewing for the job. “Is that the office manager?”

  Luke nodded. “Delia Chin,” he said, mentioning the woman’s last name as an afterthought.

  About to follow the directions he’d just given her to the break room, Kayley abruptly stopped for a second. “Dr. Dolan?”

  Luke looked at her over his shoulder. “Yes?”

  “Thank you.”

  There was that smile again, he observed. The next moment, his brow furrowed. “For telling you where the coffee machine is?”

  “For hiring me. You won’t regret it,” she told him, and then hurried off to the break room to get the coffee started before everyone else began arriving.

  Luke inserted his key into the lock and opened the door to his private office. “We’ll see, Ms. Quartermain,” he murmured under his breath. “We’ll see.”

  * * *

  Kayley could well understand why Rachel had looked so frazzled when they’d met, juggling a full schedule for not just one but two doctors. Handling the peripheral details for Dr. Dolan’s patients was challenging enough. It had been only eight hours and Kayley already felt as if she had run two 5K marathons.

  She was sitting in the exam room vacated by the doctor’s last patient, reviewing what had been entered on the computer, when she felt that someone was standing in the doorway, observing her.

  Looking up, Kayley expected to see the doctor with some sort of end-of-day instructions. Instead, it was Rachel.

  “So how was your first day?” the other woman asked. It was obvious to Kayley that Rachel was checking in on “the new girl” before she went home.

  Kayley paused briefly, wanting to choose exactly the right word. She didn’t want to seem ungrateful or to say something that could be misconstrued as a complaint. “It was educational,” she finally answered.

  Rachel laughed. “Well, I’ve certainly never heard it referred to as that before. Is Dr. Dolan too much for you?” she asked knowingly. Glancing over her shoulder to make sure she wasn’t being overheard, the physician’s assistant confided in a lowered voice, “He can be a bit demanding at times.”

  “Oh no, no. He wasn’t too much at all. It just takes some getting used to, that’s all. The terminology,” she explained. “The last doctor I worked for was a primary physician. Dr. Andrews started his practice long before they had computers in the office. He was a lovely man—kind of like in the mold of an old-fashioned country doctor. If his patients had anything complicated, he usually wound up referring them to other physicians. And he was very laid-back in his approach to his patients. He spent as long as he needed to talking to them—and even more important, listening to them,” she added, “so he could get to the bottom of what was bothering them and why they had come to see him.”

  Kayley smiled fondly, remembering. “He was really challenged having to input everything that transpired during an exam into the computer, so I usually wound up being in the room with him, doing his typing for him. Otherwise, I think he would have seen only one patient an hour.”

  Rachel nodded sympathetically. “Sounds like you miss him.”

  “In a way,” Kayley admitted, turning back to the computer. “Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy working here. It’s just very different. Everything here moves so breathtakingly fast.”

  “Here one day and you already have a list of suggestions?”

  Startled, Kayley froze for a moment, then swiveled the stool she was sitting on around to see that Dr. Dolan was standing behind her.

  “Not a list of suggestions, just observations,” she told him quickly. She noticed that Rachel had vacated the area, ducking out when Dr. Dolan had appeared. She wished the woman would have given her a warning.

  “I see a lot of patients because I want to help a lot of patients. I see no need to linger and talk to them about their hobbies and what baseball team they’re rooting for. That kind of thing is just taking time away from another patient I could be helping.”

  “I realize that, Doctor,” she replied. She debated just letting it go at that, but at heart, that wasn’t the kind of person she was. She wanted him to understand why she believed in what she’d said. “But taking a couple of minutes just to talk to a patient, to set his or her mind at ease, makes them feel that they’re something more than just a case file to you.”

  Luke could feel his temper starting to rise, something that had begun to happen only since he’d lost Jill. It took him a second to get it under control before he spoke.

  “Not that I need to justify myself to my new physician’s assistant on her first day of work,” he emphasized, “but I graduated first in my class at Johns Hopkins. I worked hard for that. People come to me not because they want good conversation, but because they want me to put them together when they feel like they’re never going to feel whole again. Some other doctor might make them feel all warm and toasty, but I’m the one who’s going to put them together, or keep working at it until I’m satisfied that I’ve done the very best that can be done. My very best. If you have a problem with that, then maybe you’d feel better working for someone else.”

  She surprised him with the enthusiasm in her voice as she answered, “No, I wouldn’t.” And then she further surprised him with her offer. “I’ll take care of the feel-good stuff, and you take care of making them feel whole,” Kayley concluded.

  Maybe she didn’t realize that she had come across as being critical of him. He did a swift review of the day in his mind. She had needed next to no cues from him.

  “Well, you did keep things flowing smoothly,” he allowed reluctantly, “so we’ll give it another day.” There was, however, a warning note in his voice.

  Kayley heard it and pretended not to. Instead, she smiled as if they were both in agreement. “Thank you
, Doctor. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” he repeated, making it sound as if it represented her last chance to get things right.

  * * *

  When Luke stepped off the elevator the following morning, he was only moderately surprised to find Kayley waiting by the office door. Maybe she was afraid that her comment at the end of the day had put her in danger of being fired and she was trying to make up for it.

  To support that theory, she had a coffee container in one hand and a large pink box that smelled of something warm and tempting in the other.

  “Still attempting to outrun possible traffic?” he asked.

  Instead of saying yes or no, she told him, “I hate being late.”

  He unlocked the main door. “It’s an admirable quality, but don’t you spend a lot of time waiting around for other people to show up this way?”

  She nodded. “But that’s still better than being late.”

  Having unlocked the double doors, he opened one and stepped back to let her enter first.

  “Have it your way.” And then he nodded at the box Kayley was holding. “What is that, by the way?”

  “I brought doughnuts for the office,” she told him, heading for the break room.

  That seemed a little excessive to him. “How many other people did you offend yesterday?”

  His question caught her completely off guard. “Nobody.”

  “Except for me,” Luke pointed out.

  She hadn’t thought he was really offended. Clearly she’d been mistaken. She quickly rallied. “That was purely unintentional, Doctor—do you like doughnuts?” she asked hopefully.

  “No, I don’t,” he answered sternly. Seeing the disappointment on her face, he relented. “But my daughter does.”