The Doctor's Forever Family

by Marie Ferrarella

  He closed Chad’s file and silently wished the boy well.

  Dan soon realized he’d been alone in the room for almost three minutes without having someone peer in to ask if he was ready for him or her. It was a little after six. Afraid to hope that the endless stream of patients had finally stopped flowing, he got up from his chair and slowly went out into the reception area. Tina was still there, sitting at the desk just as he had seen her sitting several hours ago. She hardly seemed to have budged.

  More surprising was that no one else was in the room but her.

  Was the onslaught of patients really over? It seemed too much to hope for.

  But he had to ask. “That it?” Dan deliberately looked at Tina, waiting for her to turn around.

  He’d asked the question in such a low voice, at first Tina thought she’d imagined it. Turning around, she saw the doctor standing in the doorway. Poor man looked as exhausted as he had when she and the others had left last night. She felt guilty for being part of the reason he resembled thirty miles of bad road. A sexy road, but nonetheless a bad road.

  “That’s it,” she confirmed, gesturing around the empty office.

  “There’s nobody else?” Dan pressed. “No wayward squirrel complaining of an acorn addiction?”

  She laughed at the question. Dan found the sound strangely melodic—and enticing.

  “Not that I know of, Doc.”

  He glanced at his watch and had trouble reading it. His eyes felt almost blurry. “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Time to close up and get some dinner,” Tina answered. She gathered the folders together and neatly piled them up. They needed to be alphabetized, but that could wait until morning.

  It occurred to him that he was staring at her. “You’ve been here the whole time?”

  She wasn’t sure what he meant by “whole time.” She could only attest to the time she’d seen on her watch when she’d walked in. “I’ve been here since eleven, yes,” she acknowledged.

  “Why?” Not that he wasn’t grateful, but he had to know her reasoning.

  Tina shrugged. “You looked like you were drowning. I thought you might need a little help. So I helped,” she concluded.

  Dan picked up a folder. He turned it around, examining it from both sides as if he was waiting for the folder to start talking.

  Holding the folder up for her perusal, he asked, “Where did you get these from?”

  “The trunk of my car,” she told him cheerfully. “I’d just picked up a bunch at the general store. That and a pack of yellow legal pads.” Both of which she used in her own line of work. It seemed to her that she could never get enough of either. “By the way, you’re going to need to open an account at the bank.”

  The remark came out of left field. He had no idea where it had come from or even why she was suddenly focusing on his personal finances. Granted, she would have no way of knowing, but he only intended to be here a matter of months, nine at the most. He didn’t foresee the need for an account here. Anything he needed to do could be handled via his accounts in New York.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Well, so you can deposit this,” she told him simply, opening the center drawer of the desk. “Unless, of course, you’d rather just stuff this under your mattress,” she added with a grin.

  The drawer she’d opened for his perusal was stuffed to overflowing with money.

  Chapter Eight

  The whole scene seemed almost surreal to Dan. He stared as Tina opened the drawer all the way. “What is that?”

  She looked up at him quizzically. “Money.”

  “Yes, I realize that, but what’s it doing in the drawer?” Dan couldn’t believe that the clinic’s last occupant would have left behind an entire drawer full of money like that.

  As he drew closer, he realized that the last occupant couldn’t have left the money behind because most of the bills had color to them. Money printed using colored inks had only been in circulation in the past decade, not thirty years ago.

  Had someone been using the uninhabited building to stash stolen money? It sounded far-fetched but he couldn’t think of any other explanation for that much money to be there.

  Tina looked down at the drawer and pretended to regard the various denominations.

  “Lying down mostly,” she replied to his question. And then, thinking she’d teased him enough, Tina gave him the real explanation. “From what little I know, most professionals, especially, rumor has it, doctors,” she said with an amused smile, “aren’t very efficient when it comes to charging for their services. So—I hope you don’t mind,” she qualified, “but I set up a temporary scale of rates for you. I’ve got you charging so much for a comprehensive exam—which since this was the first exam for everyone here, they all had comprehensive exams,” she felt she needed to add, then continued. “So much for a follow-up visit, et cetera.”

  Tina placed the yellow sheet with the fees she’d thought fair to charge on the table and turned it so that the doctor was able to see for himself.

  Dan looked at the numbers, trusting her to know what might be right for this area of the state. Right now, he hadn’t a clue. What to charge for services rendered was not his field of expertise.

  “When did you have time to come up with that?” he asked her.

  “Since I’ve relocated to Forever, I’ve learned how to manage my time more efficiently. Besides, I hear it’s something that all mothers know how to do. The mother’s credo is Multitask or Die,” she informed him with another engaging wide grin.

  It was obvious to Dan that the petite, sexy blonde was very pleased with herself for collecting payment for his services. Beyond being surprised by all those bills stuffed into the drawer, seeing the money actually had very little effect on him. Money had always been part of his life. Neither he nor Warren had ever done without, at least, not without funds.

  Indeed, they both could have used an emotional support system. Something they never received.

  Dan knew that wasn’t being fair to his uncle. Jason Davenport had done the best that he could. But, outside of a brother and a sister-in-law who’d died in a plane crash, abruptly leaving him to be the guardian of two young boys, Uncle Jason’d never had a family of his own. Confronted with this situation, the man had been completely out of his depth with no idea how to relate to anyone under the age of twenty-one.

  So, what Uncle Jason, a die-hard playboy, lacked in experience he’d tried to make up for with money. He threw fistfuls of it at them. Consequently, he and Warren always had the best of everything.

  The end result was that money, and the accumulation of it, had never meant that much to him. He was fairly certain that was not the case for the young woman who was now proudly displaying the bounty she’d collected for him.

  Dan tried to remember just how many patients he’d seen today and drew a blank. He’d lost count early on in the day. Still, that looked like a great deal of money in that drawer.

  A hint of skepticism entered his eyes as he asked, “You sure you didn’t overcharge them?”

  She was utterly sure. After all, her allegiance was to the people here, not to the man who was, for all intents and purposes, still a stranger.

  “If anything, you were being generous with your time,” she assured him. “And they did save both time and the money they’d be spending on gas, not having to go to Pine Ridge,” she reminded him. “That’s a savings in itself.” She cocked her head, regarding him with curiosity. She tried to get a handle on him. Was he really that selfless? “Did you just think you were seeing them for free?”

  “To be honest, I never thought about that part of it,” Dan admitted.

  This put him right up there with Doctors Without Borders and all the other various physicians who went into less than hospitable places to tend to the weak and the sick. He had just gone up several more notches in her estimation. “You, Doc, are a true humanitarian,” Tina told him warmly.

  Processing her declaration, he
realized that she had to have misunderstood his meaning. But as he started to correct her, Dan decided against it. It was rather nice being regarded as someone who’d done something for another human being without any thought to his own gain.

  Sort of like Warren.

  God, he missed his brother.

  Still, he really didn’t want her making him out to be special. Dan shrugged in response to her compliment. “I just wanted to get to the last person in line, that’s all.”

  She was not about to let him wiggle out of this. He was a good man and he deserved to be told. Deserved to know that someone else saw him for what he was.

  “I hear all good doctors are like that.” Changing the topic slightly to keep from embarrassing him further, Tina began taking the money out of the drawer. As she did so, she counted the various bills and stacked them. “Since the bank’s closed by now, I can bring this over to the sheriff’s office and have my brother-in-law lock it up for safekeeping until morning. You can open an account then.”

  “The town has a bank?” he asked in surprise. When she’d mentioned opening a bank account, he’d thought she meant in another town. He hadn’t noticed any large lending institutions when he’d driven through Forever on his way to the clinic yesterday.

  Tina deliberately opened her eyes wide as she replied. “Uh-huh. It’s this big, pink piggy bank in the town square.” She struggled to keep a straight face. That lasted approximately thirty seconds. Failing, she started to laugh.

  Her laugh was light, melodic, like sunbeams riding the spring breeze. He liked the sound. “Very funny.”

  She hadn’t been able to resist the wry remark. “Sorry. In case you’re wondering, I really do know where you’re coming from.” When he looked at her quizzically, she elaborated. “I didn’t think that there was a place less backward than Forever when I first passed through here. But I learned pretty quickly that there were a lot more important things than being urban and sophisticated. All in all, I really wouldn’t want Bobby to grow up anywhere else,” Tina admitted.

  Everyone in town doted on the boy and looked after him. She certainly didn’t lack for babysitters when she needed them.

  They’d have to tie him to a post to get him to stay here one second longer than he had to, Dan thought. But there was no point in arguing with her about the merits of big city life as opposed to some place where the town fathers—or mothers—rolled up the sidewalks at night. To each his own, he supposed.

  Finally finished counting the money that had been taken in today, she looked up and told Dan the total sum that had been collected. His expression remained the same. She took a guess as to why.

  “I know that probably doesn’t seem like very much to you, given what people pay for a doctor’s visit in New York, but out here, it’s still a bit.”

  The truth of the matter was, he was feeling somewhat guilty about having this money. It wasn’t as if he needed it, or had come here hoping to make his fortune. Granted, if he were working for the hospital in New York, he’d have no qualms about accepting a sizable paycheck, but that was different. He wasn’t directly taking someone’s hard-earned money and putting it into his own pocket.

  “Why don’t you take half of that?” Dan suddenly suggested.

  Tina looked at him as if he’d taken leave of his senses. “Excuse me?”

  “Take half,” he repeated. “I mean, if you hadn’t come by and gotten everything organized the way you did, I wouldn’t have collected anything—and on top of that, I’d probably be hip-deep in scraps of paper.” He paused for a second, debating the next words out of his mouth, then decided she’d probably already guessed as much. “I’ve never run my own office before.”

  The amused smile in her eyes filtered down to her lips, curving them. He caught himself watching her lips longer than he should have.

  “I kind of picked up on that,” she told him. “But I still can’t take your money—”

  He was not about to take no for an answer. “Consider it payment.”

  “I was considering it payback,” she corrected, referring to her services, not his money. “For seeing Bobby in the middle of the night. You didn’t charge me for that,” she reminded him, and explained further. “I don’t like being indebted to someone.”

  That made two of them, Dan thought. In his opinion, she had come to his aid in the nick of time. “Neither do I.”

  Tina paused for a minute, studying him. “I guess we’re at an impasse.”

  Dan blew out a breath, then nodded. “I guess we are. Would you like to try to resolve this over dinner?” he suggested.

  Tina’s blue eyes widened as she suddenly remembered. “Dinner.”

  “You know, food, something to drink. Served after four o’clock,” he prompted when she’d all but gone into a tailspin at the mere suggestion of going out to dinner with him. Was that a good sign, or a bad one? Not that he wanted her to think that he meant anything by the invitation. She’d helped him out, he wanted to show his appreciation in a simple manner.

  “No.” Tina shook her head at his response.

  “It’s not served after four o’clock?” he asked, confused. Was this another quaint local custom, like pitching in and fixing up the clinic? He hadn’t seen any signs of a potential nightlife when he’d passed through yesterday. Maybe everyone went to bed early out of boredom.

  Tina only shook her head harder, negating his question. “No, I was supposed to bring you by the diner for dinner. Miss Joan told me to bring you over there the minute you got done.”

  Dinner did sound like a pretty good idea right now, given the fact that his stomach was complaining and the last thing he’d consumed had come from Miss Joan’s diner aeons ago. But before pleasure, he wanted to talk business. He needed to resolve this so that there’d be nothing weighing down his mind.

  “Look, I’m not sure how you managed to get time off to help me this way, but is there any chance I might be able to hire you away from your boss and get you to come to work the front desk for me full-time?” Dan asked. He didn’t care what it would take. He’d gladly pay her out of his own pocket for the duration if she agreed to work for him.

  When she didn’t answer immediately, he tried a little flattery to move things along in the right direction. “Things went a lot more smoothly once you took over.”

  Tina smiled, both at the compliment and at the doctor’s misconception. But then, how would he know? He hadn’t been in town long enough for anyone to tell him anything. That made him her responsibility, she thought, amused by the notion. Something else she wasn’t planning on letting him know about.

  “I’m my own boss,” she told him. “So, yes, I think there’s a chance you could get me to come work for you.” She rose, putting the money into a large manila envelope whose glue had faded from the sealing flap. She folded it down anyway.

  “Let’s get this over to Rick,” she said, holding the envelope slightly aloft. “And then we can go to Miss Joan’s before she starts getting together a search party to come find us.”

  “Miss Joan a relative of yours?”

  The woman was like a second mother to her. Miss Joan had literally insisted that she and Bobby come live with her until she felt ready to find a place of her own.

  “You and Bobby bring sunshine into my life, Baby Girl,” the older woman had told her more than once. And the woman refused to accept any money from her for rent, arguing that she “save it for a rainy day” instead.

  “In a manner of speaking,” Tina allowed, sliding the manila envelope into her oversize shoulder bag. “She’s my guardian angel.”

  Dan rolled her words over in his head, trying to fathom the meaning behind the statement. Holding the front door open for Tina, he waited until she stepped out onto the porch. “Someday you’re going to have to explain that to me.”

  “Someday I will,” she agreed cheerfully. She saw him checking his pockets and frowning. “What’s the matter?”

  He nodded toward the door they’d just
closed behind them. “I don’t think I got the key for the house from the deputy.”

  “There probably isn’t one. Most people don’t lock their doors around here,” she informed him. “They certainly didn’t thirty years ago.” She saw the look of disbelief in his eyes. “The most outrageous thing that happens in Forever is when Miss Irene sleepwalks through the middle of town in her nightgown, or drives around town—also asleep—without it.” She smiled as he continued to stare at her, stunned. “We’re not exactly a hotbed of crime waves around here.”

  Tina stopped for a moment, trying to remember what someone had told her. “The last burglary in Forever occurred when Patrick Fields stole the high school mascot—a miniature pony named Clyde—and hid it in his room. He got a lot worse from his mother than he did from the sheriff,” she assured him.

  Despite what she said about the town’s lack of crime, he felt uneasy about leaving the house open that way. He supposed that it would do no harm, inasmuch as he’d found a way to lock the cabinet with all the medications he’d brought with him in it.

  He didn’t have much else of value here and if the medications were safe, he could reconcile himself to the rest of it.

  He walked with her to his vehicle. After dinner, he could always bring her back to pick up her car. “What do you do around here for fun?” he asked Tina.

  “You mean other than steal miniature ponies?” she asked, amused.

  He laughed, letting her get a jab in. “Yeah, other than that.”

  “Count stars,” she told him. When she saw him looking at her skeptically, she tried to convince him that she wasn’t pulling his leg. “I’m serious. Big cities have a way of blotting out most of the stars,” she told him. “There’s a whole sky full of them out here on any clear night.”