by Arlene James
“There is that,” Brooks admitted. Then he closed his eyes and thanked God. It was good news, better, anyway. He’d focus on that and keep praying. Meanwhile, he had work to do.
After what felt like a very long day, he shook the hand of the radiologist, thanked her and asked for a report to be emailed to his private account. He’d decide later whether to show it to Eva or condense it for her. Right now, he needed to think. The idea that he could have feelings for another woman who could be knocking on death’s door horrified him, especially as she did not share his faith.
Frankly, he couldn’t figure out how it had happened. Eva could hardly have been more different than Brigitte. Both were tall blondes, and that’s where the similarity ended. Brigitte had been a sweet, gentle soul with a slender core of steel, quintessentially feminine, with an infinite ability to love and a quiet intelligence that instinctively sought the sidelines. Eva made Brooks think of Amazonian warriors and medieval queens, strong women who buried their fears and did battle with every tool at their disposal, even if it was only humor.
Brigitte had sought to protect first Morgan and then Brooks from her illness, while preserving her own right to self-determination. He wondered suddenly whom Eva was protecting and why she had fallen into his hands. Eva had come from the Kansas City area, he knew, but why?
At first, he hadn’t wanted to know. He’d assumed, hoped that she would shortly be out of his life. Now he needed to know if she was running from or to someone. What, other than the hand of God, had brought her here to this place, to him? Something told him the answer to that question was the key to both Eva’s past and her future. All he could do in this moment was ask God for the courage to do and be all that he should in order to take that key in hand and open the door for her that she needed opened.
“Lord, help us both,” he whispered, going out to meet her.
Chapter Ten
“Eva, I’m not a radiologist,” Brooks said for perhaps the fifth time, his expression suspiciously bland. “You’ve got one of the best, though. She’ll give us a thorough evaluation, hopefully by Monday or Tuesday. Until then we just carry on as before.”
“Easy for you to say,” she grumbled, reaching for the handle of the car door. “You’re not faced with a long weekend of doubt.”
“You could come in to the office in the morning, but I don’t have anything for you to do. You took care of all of the transcription this afternoon, and you’ve reorganized everything but the parking lot.”
She stuck out her tongue like a petulant child, and he laughed.
“That wasn’t criticism,” he insisted. “Tell you what, put that agile brain of yours to work on a reorganizational plan for the office as a whole, a work flow plan, personnel included. Can you do that?”
She shrugged. “I suppose. Someone needs to be ordering supplies besides your nurses.”
“Okay, but who? Reception, Accounting and Records all have their hands full. That just leaves doctors, nurses and technicians.”
She frowned at him. “I’ll think on it.”
“You do that. I’ll see about getting you a tablet to work on.”
“Whatever,” she grumbled, opening the car door.
He waited there at the end of the brick walkway, the engine of his sedan idling, while she climbed the steps, crossed the porch and let herself into Chatam House. The great house felt oddly empty, though Magnolia appeared before Eva made it all the way across the foyer to the staircase.
“Oh, good,” she said, “Maryanne and I feared we’d have to eat alone. Dorinda and Tony have gone into Dallas to spend the evening with Bayard and his family, and Odelia, Kent and Murdock are at the hospital. How did it go for you today, dear?”
Eva shrugged listlessly. “Well, they caged my head and put it in a big metal tube, then had someone pound on the tube with rubber mallets for hours. Then they pumped me full of dye and did it all over again. Then they did it with another machine. That’s about it.”
Magnolia chuckled. “Brooks had nothing to say afterward?”
“Yeah, he said the radiologist wants to be buried in a gold-plated car inside a pink mausoleum. Go figure.”
Magnolia lifted her eyebrows. “I suppose there’s no accounting for taste,” she said.
Just to rag her, Eva mused, “My pine box is sounding kind of dull now. Mom used to have a shoebox covered in dyed macaroni. What do you think of that?”
“I think you’ll need a lot of macaroni,” Magnolia said with a straight face. “Personally, I’d rather eat it than be buried in it, but not tonight. Tonight we’re having homemade turkey potpie.”
“Ooh. I’m suddenly hungry.”
Magnolia’s mouth twitched. “We’ll finish our tea and meet you in the dining room.”
Eva hurried to wash up and get back downstairs.
Maryanne had come over to keep Magnolia company, while Hubner, the eldest Chatam sibling, had bowed to pressure to stay home and rest. Everyone else had returned to his or her normal life.
“I understand that Hypatia will transfer to the hospital here in Buffalo Creek once she’s out of ICU,” Eva mentioned over her potpie, which proved to be as delicious as everything else Hilda cooked.
The other women looked at her with surprise, and Magnolia dropped her fork. “That’s wonderful!”
“You didn’t know?”
“First I’ve heard of it.” Sitting back, Magnolia pressed her linen napkin to her mouth and sighed happily.
“That will make things so much easier,” Maryanne opined with obvious relief.
“That’s what Brooks said,” Eva told her.
“God bless that boy,” Magnolia declared.
“Actually, I think it was Hypatia’s idea,” Eva said, “but of course, Brooks would have to arrange it.”
That news lightened the mood considerably, but it didn’t last, not for Eva. Maryanne rushed off right after dinner to inform her branch of the family, and Magnolia went into the library to make telephone calls to several others, leaving Eva on her own. She appropriated a notebook and several ink pens, carrying them up to her room, but she couldn’t concentrate on Brooks’s new office flowchart.
TV didn’t help. She couldn’t keep her mind on that, either. Thoughts of Ricky plagued her almost as much as thoughts of the outcome of her tests, and she missed him with a visceral sharpness that was as physical as any symptom she’d ever experienced, but she dared not call him, not yet, not unless she had reason to hope.
That was hard to do. She feared hope almost as much as she feared the thing in her head, perhaps more. Hope raised the prospect of disappointment, and she wasn’t sure she could face disappointment. Real hope could unleash the future and its myriad possibilities, one of which—dared she even think it?—could be, might be, some sort of personal relationship with Brooks Leland. She physically spun away from the thought, even as she yearned to latch on to it, especially as she yearned to latch onto it, but the idea would not stay away, no matter what she did.
Eventually she resorted to prayer again, but this time it became a rambling, angry diatribe against everything that had gone wrong in her life from the absence of her father and deaths of her mother and sister, to her ex-husband’s unfaithfulness and her aunt’s thousands of unkind remarks and finally to this very moment of agonizing uncertainty and the many fears that suddenly pressed in upon her. She had thought herself ready to face death. Now she wondered if the truth might be simply that she wasn’t prepared to face life. At some point she did drop off to sleep, waking hours later from a heavy, dreamless slumber to the sound of someone knocking on her door.
She elbowed her way up groggily from her pillow and croaked out, “Yes?”
“You’re wanted on the telephone, dear,” said Odelia’s twittering voice.
“Oh. Thank you.”
Eva looked at the phone on her bedside table, wondered vaguely why she hadn’t heard it ring and sat up before gingerly lifting the receiver from its base and pressing a green button. “Hello?”
“Eva? It’s Lyla.” An invitation to dinner followed, along with the promise that Chester would see her safely delivered to their doorstep about five o’clock that afternoon. “So we can have a good visit,” Lyla said.
Eva wasted no time in accepting the invitation. Mere moments later, she hung up the phone and, relieved for something to look forward to, fell back on the bed and smiled. Abruptly, as if someone had flipped a switch, the flowchart suddenly began to churn through her mind, and she got up to jot down her thoughts before she lost them in her preparations for the day.
After a hot shower, she dressed and went down for a late breakfast, which she ate in the kitchen, while Hilda bustled around putting up lunches for those going to the hospital that day: Hubner, Magnolia, Dorinda and Tony, the twins having returned to California already. Apparently Chatams did not eat cafeteria food, but why would they if they could eat Hilda food?
The flowchart wouldn’t leave Eva alone, though, and she found herself scribbling on a notepad that Hilda kept attached with a magnet to the built-in stainless steel refrigerator. Hurrying back up to her room, she wound up on the sitting area floor, notebook sheets spread out around her as she tried to make sense of the needs, duties and processes necessary to run a physician’s practice smoothly.
Obviously, Brooks and his staff were overtaxed, and the partnership was farming out more and more of their work, which had to be hurting their bottom line. Patient care did not seem to have suffered; Brooks was far too conscientious of a physician to let that happen. Still, some areas of the practice approached chaos, the ordering of supplies, for instance, and the telephone system, too. Several times callers had rung through to the transcription office instead of the appointment desk, and Eva knew that the same happened with other extensions. She began to believe that Ruby had the right idea, sort of. What Brooks Leland and his partner needed was not an office manager but a manager for their practice.
It wouldn’t be her, of course, unless...
She put away unless and concentrated on the reorganization, and before she knew it, the pounding in her head sent her in search of food with which to take her pills, and then it was time to get dressed and head downstairs again to find Chester. He’d already brought around the car and insisted on opening the back door for her, perhaps because she’d impulsively worn the cape. Remembering Bri’s fascination with her hair, she’d coiled her long locks into a tight chignon at the nape of her neck. The overall effect did seem rather formal, though beneath the white wool and satin she wore nothing more than black leggings and a long matching T-shirt with the red heels. She’d knotted a red bandana and looped it loosely, using it almost as a necklace.
“I could drive myself, you know,” she muttered to Chester, “if Brooks would give me my car keys.”
Chester smiled sympathetically and said, “I think he’s afraid you’d drive off into the sunset and we’d never see you again.”
“I wouldn’t!” she insisted indignantly. But she might have in the beginning. Besides, she owed Brooks money. He was entirely within his rights to hold on to her keys.
“I’ll gladly drive you,” Chester told her as she settled down into the backseat, “anywhere you want to go. If I didn’t, Hilda would have my head.”
For some reason, that moved Eva more than all the gratitude and compliments from the family had. She couldn’t believe it, though, when Chester insisted that she keep her seat until he came around to let her out of the car after they arrived at Morgan and Lyla Simone’s lovely old redbrick house.
Though not nearly as old as Chatam House, the place couldn’t have been built more than twenty or thirty years past the turn of the century. It had a solid, permanent feel to it, from the red clay tile of its roof to the natural stone of its majestic chimneys, as well as a certain gracefulness in its lines and multipaned windows. The front door, with its fanciful wrought iron grille, opened as Eva slid out of the town car, but neither Morgan nor Lyla Simone greeted them from the redbrick, half-moon porch. Instead, Brooks smiled down at them.
Such delight surged through Eva that she felt almost giddy with it.
“Thanks for bringing her over, Chester,” he called, “but don’t worry about picking her up later. I’ll bring her home.”
“Very well,” Chester said, winking at Eva.
Partly to hide her reaction to Brooks’s presence, partly in gratitude for Chester’s kindness, she kissed Chester’s plump cheek. Blushing, he hurriedly shut the car door and rushed around to drop down into the driver’s seat. Brooks grinned as she joined him on the porch.
“You constantly amaze,” he said, looking her over, head to toe. “I don’t know any other woman who can pull off that cape, but on you it works.”
She bowed her head in acknowledgment of his compliment. “Thank you.” Swirling the cape around her, she preceded him into the house.
The terracotta floors and light cherry wood walls of the entry hall carried through to the spacious living area and on into the sumptuous, modern kitchen. Morgan sat at a gleaming rust-colored granite breakfast bar, feeding his busy daughter while Lyla Simone stirred a large pot bubbling on the stove.
“Something smells wonderful,” Eva commented.
“I hope you like gumbo,” Lyla said over her shoulder.
“I’m sure I will,” Eva said, glancing at Brooks, “if it tastes as good as it smells.”
“It does,” Morgan promised. “Lyla lived in Baton Rouge for a while, and she picked up some interesting recipes.”
Lyla turned from the big black range then, brandishing a long wooden spoon. She tilted her head. “Girl, you look fine,” she said, as Brooks slipped the white cape from Eva’s shoulders. “Don’t let my daughter anywhere near that thing, though.”
“I’ll just put this with my coat,” Brooks said, leaving the room.
Eva parked herself on a wrought iron stool next to Morgan and made eyes at the baby, who grinned around a mouthful of carrots and rice and squished a fistful of green beans.
“Don’t squeeze ’em, elf,” Morgan admonished. “Eat them.”
Eva picked up a green bean, squeezed it between her thumb and forefinger then calmly ate it. Bri promptly stuffed her fist into her mouth, squished green beans and all.
Morgan looked at Eva, handed off the spoon with which he’d been attempting to feed his daughter, and abandoned his stool, staying, “You seem to be better at this than I am, and I’ve been told to set the table.”
Shrugging, Eva moved over to his stool. Brooks returned and took her former place, leaning his elbows on the countertop.
“You’ve been drafted, I see.”
“It would seem so.”
Eva waited until Bri’s mouth was empty before she served up half a spoonful of brown rice with bits of juicy beef in it. Then she placed a single carrot slice in front of the baby. Bri poked at it with her fingertip then put the carrot in her mouth. After she’d chewed on all that for a while, Eva placed a green bean in front of her. Bri squished it then she ate it. When Eva offered her the next bite, she turned her head away, so Eva offered her a drink from her sippy cup instead. That was eagerly accepted, and afterward they went back to the rice and beef. In that fashion, the plate was slowly, patiently cleaned.
Eva couldn’t help smiling as she fed the little one. It seemed like only yesterday that she’d done this with Ricky, like yesterday and at the same time like forever ago. Suddenly she missed him so keenly that the ache felt as physical as a cut or a broken bone. She hoped, she prayed, that he did not miss her like this. As badly as it hurt to think it, she hoped that he’d adjusted to her absence, that he’d settled into his new life, started to have fun with his dad, made friend
s with his cheesy stepmother. She wanted him to have a normal life, a good, happy life, not a life filled with grief.
Eva looked around to find the Chatams standing side by side at the end of the counter staring at her.
“What?” she asked.
Morgan pointed at his daughter. “She never eats that much for us.”
Lyla folded her arms, saying, “Something tells me you’ve done this before.”
Eva opened her mouth. To lie. But somehow she just couldn’t do it, so instead she merely shrugged.
“Did your sister have children?” Brooks asked softly.
Eva shook her head. “No. Ava never had the chance to marry and start a family.”
“I see. I’m sorry.”
Eva nodded. “Me, too.”
She told herself that maybe she could call Ricky with good news next week. Maybe she could even go home and reclaim him soon, but would he even want to see her by then?
Perhaps it would be best to leave him with his father. What then? Stay here? This was where she really wanted to be, but how could she live so far from her son?
She bit her lip and bowed her head, wondering if she should tell these good people about Ricky. No. They wouldn’t understand why she’d done what she had. She’d set out to protect her son from the grief she’d experienced, and she’d hold to that, even if it meant protecting him from the good intentions of those who would call him to her side if she was too ill to prevent it. But, oh, if the news was truly good, she could tell the truth and have friends and maybe even belong somewhere. Maybe even love someone.
Oh, God, what am I doing? Eva wondered, and then she realized what she was doing. She was praying. Again. And why not? She closed her eyes and thought, I don’t want to lie to these people, and I don’t want to stay away from my son. I want to live, and I want to believe. I want what these Chatams have, and I need You to show me how to get it. But that has to be Your will for me. I guess I need to start there, with Your will for me, so that’s what I need You to show me now, Your will.
