A Second Chance for the Single Dad

by Marie Ferrarella

  Ralph continued clutching on to her lab coat. He was looking at the table as if it were some sort of ancient sacrificial altar and it was his turn to be the new offering. He was practically shaking as he cried, “I don’t want to lie down.”

  “You’ll be doing me a really big favor if you do,” Kayley said, gently prying his fingers from her coat, even as she allowed him to hang on to her hand. “It’ll do all the work and take lots of pictures so the doctor can fix you all up to play soccer with your friends. You’ll be good as new.”

  Ralph shook his head so hard his light brown hair flew back and forth about his face. “I changed my mind. I don’t want to play soccer.”

  “But you want to walk, don’t you, honey?” Kayley asked him in a voice that made it impossible for Ralph not to agree.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, albeit a little leery.

  “Well, the doctor needs to fix your leg so you can walk and he can’t do that until he can see what’s going on inside your leg. That means he needs those pictures from the MRI machine.”

  “Okay,” he finally agreed.

  Ralph let her help him onto the table, and then very gingerly, he lay down. But the moment he felt the table he was on begin to move and draw him into the machine—a lamb being slid into the mouth of the volcano—he began to scream and bolted upright.

  Kayley signaled to the technician to stop. That was when she took out the headphones and tablet she’d thought to pick up on their way down here.

  “Ralph, I want you to put these headphones on and just concentrate on the movie that you see on the tablet. Can you do that for me?” Kayley asked him.

  The boy didn’t appear too amenable, but Kayley had already pulled up the movie and he saw what was on the screen. It was an action flick depicting a group of popular superheroes joining forces to save the world.

  Ralph complied and lay down quietly.

  Kayley adjusted the headphones and gave it a few seconds. When she was fairly certain that the boy was completely captivated by what he saw on the tablet, she looked over toward Teddy and nodded at the technician.

  “Go ahead,” she told him. “I think Ralph’ll be fine now.”

  Fortunately, the test required that only the boy’s lower torso be inside the cylinder, leaving his upper torso and head free and clear of what was, for Ralph, obviously an extremely intimidating machine.

  Kayley remained standing beside Ralph for the duration of the test, watching him to make sure that the tablet didn’t suddenly lose its Wi-Fi connection for some reason, thereby possibly plunging the boy back into a state of terror.

  “You want a chair?” the tech asked, raising his voice so she could hear him above the constant clatter of the machine.

  Kayley would have preferred to be sitting, but she didn’t want to risk any deviation from the procedure setting Ralph off. The sooner this test was over with, the sooner she could get the boy back upstairs and away from the frightening MRI machine.

  * * *

  The test took a total of forty-five minutes. Looking at Ralph’s face told her that he had gotten comfortable lying here and watching the superheroes racing to save humanity on her tablet. He looked completely enthralled with the action on the screen, which was what she had been hoping for.

  When the test was finally over, the table moved back into the neutral position where it had started. Ralph seemed surprised when she picked him up from the table and set him down on the floor.

  His small face puckered up in consternation.

  “That’s it?” he asked when she took the headphones off his ears.

  “That’s it,” she answered. “I told you that the test would go fast. Let’s get you back upstairs to the exam room so your mom can find you when she gets back with your little brother.”

  “Can I watch the movie until she gets back?”

  She smiled at Ralph fondly as she told him, “Sure.”

  “Cool,” he responded, plopping the headphones back on his head. His eyes were immediately riveted on the action on the screen.

  With a laugh, she guided him back onto the elevator and took him to the second floor.

  As they got out of the elevator, Kayley put her hand on his shoulder and “steered” Ralph back to the original exam room.

  Ralph never took his eyes off the tablet.

  Happily for him, his mother returned with his little brother in tow just as the movie he was watching so intently came to an end.

  Chapter Six

  Kayley thought she was going to have to go looking for the doctor to tell him that Ralph’s test was over. However, Luke walked into the exam room at almost the very same time that Mrs. Jordan and her younger son, Simon, did.

  Ralph perked up as soon as he saw his mother. “I got to watch this really cool movie on Kayley’s tablet,” he told her excitedly. “Can we come back here again?” This time, the question was directed to Kayley, not his mother. His little brother instantly looked wistful, as if he was left out because he wanted to see a movie, too.

  “I’m sure we’re going to,” his mother responded, glancing at the doctor to find out just what the next step was.

  “I’ll give you a call either late this afternoon or tomorrow morning, once I get a chance to review the MRI scans,” Luke told her.

  Janis Jordan nodded. Not knowing which of them had taken her son down for the test, Mrs. Jordan threw the question out to both of them.

  “Did he give you any trouble?” It looked as if her younger son would cause her to lose her balance at any moment.

  “Ralph was great,” Kayley reassured the boy’s mother.

  Ralph was obviously eager to describe his experience. Words all but exploded from his lips.

  “She put me on this table and it sounded like this giant machine was going to swallow me, but I wasn’t scared, Mom.” The eleven-year-old proudly puffed up his chest. “Kayley put these big headphones on me, you know, like Grandpa likes to listen to, and I couldn’t hear the loud chomping noise the machine was making. All I heard was what the superheroes were saying.”

  Still being yanked to one side, Mrs. Jordan looked at her wearily and said a heartfelt “Thank you.”

  Kayley’s genial smile filtered into her eyes as she told the woman, “Don’t mention it. I’m just glad I could help so that he wasn’t afraid.”

  “Afraid?” Ralph crowed as if that was the furthest thing from his mind. “I want to do it again.” He turned around to look at Kayley and asked her, “Can we do it again?”

  “We’ll see. First we have to get you well,” she said, putting her hand on his shoulder and guiding him to the door. “Now go home with your mom and help her out by being good, okay?”

  “Okay,” Ralph agreed brightly, clearly keen to please his new friend.

  As the trio left the office, Kayley could almost feel the doctor’s eyes washing over her, taking measure of her as if she were some kind of alien creature.

  “Headphones?” he asked.

  She nodded, explaining, “I was trying to distract him.”

  Luke appeared to still be wrestling with the initial details. “You carry around headphones and some sort of a tablet with you?”

  Evidently, the man wasn’t one of those people who was attached to his wireless device. She wouldn’t go so far as to say she was attached to hers, but she did like having it close by. And it had turned out to be handy this time around.

  “It’s a long story.” One she was fairly confident that he didn’t want her to get into. “But the point is it did work in this instance.”

  “Yes, I know.” He saw her looking at him in surprise. He supposed that he could tell her he’d checked in on how things were going. “The technician said he would have had a hell of a time taking that MRI if you hadn’t gotten the patient to watch some mov
ie or other that you had on your tablet.”

  Ordinarily, he wasn’t a curious man, but he had to admit, there were things about this woman that managed to arouse his curiosity.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, just how did you happen to have that particular movie available for the boy?”

  It wasn’t all that unique an occurrence. “I’ve got a lot of movies on my tablet.” She smiled at the doctor, wondering what he would think of her when he heard her freely admit, “As it happens, I am a fan of superheroes. I have been ever since I was a little girl.”

  Maybe it was a female thing. “My daughter is, too,” Luke told her, and then he had to qualify his statement. “I think.”

  Kayley cocked her head slightly to one side as she looked at him incredulously. “You think?” she repeated. “You don’t know?”

  He upbraided himself for saying anything, but he couldn’t very well just walk out without appearing to be exceptionally rude.

  “We don’t exactly get much chance to talk,” he told the overenergized physician’s assistant. “She’s asleep when I leave, and most of the time, she’s asleep when I come home.”

  That didn’t seem right. “How early is her bedtime?” Kayley questioned. “The office closes at five. I assume that you go home not too long after that.”

  “You assume wrong,” Luke informed her. “After the office closes, I do evening rounds at the hospital, checking on all my patients who had inpatient surgery.”

  “Okay,” Kayley allowed. “But that still leaves weekends.”

  “Not really,” he answered. “I volunteer at a free clinic in Santa Ana on Saturdays and at another one in LA on Sundays.”

  Like a lightbulb that had been turned out, her bright smile faded and an expression that was half sad, half reproving took its place. He thought he even saw pity in her eyes, which irked him.

  “You do realize that you’re missing the best years of your daughter’s life,” Kayley pointed out.

  He didn’t care to be lectured to, especially not by a new hire. “We’ll have time,” Luke told the interfering woman curtly.

  She knew she should keep her mouth shut, but Kayley couldn’t help herself. The words just burst out before she could hold them back. The man was lucky enough to have a child and he seemed almost indifferent to the little girl.

  “When?” she asked. “When you’re walking her down the aisle at her wedding?”

  His eyes narrowed. Obviously, Quartermain didn’t understand that he was struggling to hold his tongue. “That is none of your business. You were hired to assist me in the exam rooms, Ms. Quartermain, not organize my personal life.”

  “On the contrary, Dr. Dolan, your personal life is very organized. Down to the split second. What you need is a little disorganization in your life. Specifically, some free time to spend with your daughter.”

  He wondered if the woman realized that she was inches away from being fired. This was still the trial period. “You’re overstepping your place.”

  “Maybe,” she agreed, and he thought that was the end of it. He should have realized that it wasn’t. “But there’s a little girl’s happiness at stake. Now, I’m sure that your mother-in-law is really great with her, but a little girl needs her daddy. Heaven knows I would have given anything to have had some extra time with mine,” she said with such heartfelt sincerity that it caught him totally unprepared for a moment.

  Luke was the first one to admit that he wasn’t good with emotional situations.

  “Um, yes, well—” He had no idea what to say in the face of grief and loss, so after a moment spent being completely tongue-tied, he just switched topics. “Good job today with that boy.”

  Kayley’s smile was back, although he noted that it was the tiniest bit frayed around the edges, as if she was putting him on notice that this discussion wasn’t over with yet.

  “Thank you, Doctor.” And then she explained, “I just treated him the way I would have wanted to be treated at his age.”

  Luke was all set to retreat to his office, to remain there until office hours resumed at two, but her statement caught his interest as well as once again arousing his curiosity.

  “You can remember that far back?” he asked, wondering if she was just putting him on. “That is, I don’t mean to imply that you’re anywhere near old, but there has to be about twenty years between you and that boy—”

  “Twenty-one, actually,” Kayley corrected.

  “Okay,” Luke said, accepting the number. “That makes it an even bigger difference in age. How can you possibly remember what it was like to be eleven?” he asked. He barely remembered what he’d done a week ago. She had to be pulling his leg.

  To his surprise, Kayley said, “Easily. I remember being upset that nobody took the time to explain to me what was about to happen when I went in to get my tonsils out. I was always getting sick and coming down with a sore throat. And then suddenly, there I was, eight years old and in a hospital gown. My mother had to work, so she couldn’t remain with me and I remember being totally terrified.”

  She was setting him up. This had to do with her lecture about practicing more personalized medicine, he was sure of it.

  “Let me guess—a kindly old doctor sat down with you, explained everything, and suddenly, you weren’t afraid anymore,” he said sarcastically.

  “You’re only half-right,” Kayley replied, ignoring his tone. “Actually, it was an intern. Dr. Greene. He was still in the formative stage and hadn’t become jaded yet.” She deliberately caught Luke’s gaze. “He told me that there was nothing to be afraid of. That he had a little girl my age and she had just had the very same operation. Whether or not he was making it up, I don’t know, but it really helped me at the time. I wasn’t exactly blasé when I was taken into surgery, but I wasn’t terrified anymore, either.”

  Luke gave her a very skeptical look. “And you’re telling me this so I start holding my patients’ hands and talking to them to make the surgical experience a pleasant experience for them?”

  The man was being pigheaded—she could tell that by his tone of voice. Anything she said about the way he related to his patients would only get him to dig his heels in more.

  “I wouldn’t presume to tell you what to do with your patients, Doctor. That’s for you to decide. But I really would suggest that you find a little bit of time for your daughter before she’s grown and going away to college. Except when you’re sitting in a dentist’s chair getting a root canal, time really does move very fast, and before you know it, it’s gone.”

  What she said struck home, even though he didn’t want to admit it. It didn’t make him think about the dentist, but it did make him think of Jill. He’d been so convinced that they had all the time in the world. That they’d grow old together and have time to travel as a couple rather than having half a world between them, with her at home while he was overseas.

  Kayley saw the expression on his face change. Either she had managed to get him to come around a little...or she was going to be fired by the end of the day. Still, she didn’t regret what she had just said to him. If anything, she regretted not being able to get through to him.

  “Don’t forget to take that box of doughnuts for Lily and your mother-in-law home,” she told Luke just before she made herself scarce.

  Walking into his office, Luke sat down and then glanced at his schedule. His last inpatient was scheduled to be released once he checked the man over.

  He supposed that there was no law that said he had to do it after his office hours. He knew the hospital actually preferred patients going home earlier than later. The rule of thumb had always been to make them well and get them on their feet, moving toward home. As quickly as possible.

  If he signed Elliot Murphy out now, before office hours resumed this afternoon—and didn’t stay after hours to review his
files and the surgeries he had scheduled for tomorrow—he could get home before Lily’s bedtime.

  The thought of seeing his daughter made his stomach tighten just a little.

  Luke had to admit to himself that he was keeping these long hours in part to avoid being around Lily. She looked like a miniature of her mother, so much so that it sometimes hurt to look at her.

  But more than that, he had to come to grips with the fact that he just didn’t know how to relate to a five-year-old.

  He supposed it came back to his lack of people skills, the thing that this new PA kept harping on. Lord, but he missed Jill. He hadn’t needed people skills with Jill. She’d talked for the both of them and seemed to intuit what he was thinking. He hadn’t really needed to say much of anything. She’d known him inside and out.

  He rose to his feet. Maybe that annoying physician’s assistant with that wide smile had a point. Maybe it was time for him to stop running like this and be grateful for what he did have before he didn’t have that, either.

  But first, there was a patient he needed to discharge from the hospital.

  * * *

  “Luke, is that you?” Barbara Baxter looked up, surprised and caught off guard when her son-in-law walked in through the front door at five minutes after six o’clock.

  “Who did you think it was, a burglar with a key?” Luke quipped, resting his briefcase on the hall table.

  Lily had bounced up from the sofa to see what the excitement was all about. She looked uncertainly at her father, not knowing what she was supposed to do.

  “What’s a burglar, Grandma?” she asked.

  Not wanting to alarm the little girl, Barbara answered, “Someone coming in who you weren’t expecting to be in your house.”

  “You mean like Daddy?” Lily asked, still looking at her father as if she thought perhaps she was just imagining him.