“Out of the mouths of babes,” Melanie said with a laugh. “Literally.”
April surprised her by taking exception to that. “I’m not a baby,” she protested.
“You certainly are not,” Melanie agreed with feeling, doing her best to keep a straight face.
Cutting the cupcake in half, she split it between the sunny little girl and the dour-faced doctor.
Mitch looked at the two plates, then at her. “Why aren’t you having any?” he asked.
She pointed out the obvious. “There’s not all that much to go around.”
Mitch did the same—or so he believed. “You could have made a bigger cake. Can’t be that much more work involved.”
“Then I would have had to invite other people here to share it and I don’t think you’re socialized enough for that,” she said bluntly. “At least, I didn’t think you’d appreciate me making a fuss over you in front of other people.”
The woman was right, he wouldn’t have liked that, although he had to admit he was surprised that she actually realized that.
“I didn’t know you were that insightful,” he commented.
“Lots of things about me you don’t know,” Melanie responded. She caught a movement out of the corner of her eyes on the exam table. “April, don’t you like the cupcake?” she asked.
The little girl had pushed away her plate and moved it so that it was in front of Melanie. There was still a quarter of the cupcake left on it.
The blond head bobbed up and down with feeling. “Very much.”
That didn’t make any sense to her. “Then why didn’t you finish it?”
The small face was utterly guileless as she said, “’Cause I wanted to share it with you.”
Melanie had no idea why the little girl’s answer caused tears to form in the corners of her eyes, but it took her a second before she could regain control.
Clearing her throat, she told April, “That’s very sweet, honey. Tell you what, why don’t you take this to Jimmy? I’m sure he’d like to have some, too.”
The suggestion met with total approval. “Okay.” Scooping up the plate with both hands, April flashed a huge smile at both of them, said, “Happy Annie-versary!” again and took off.
Mitch watched the little girl hurry down the hall with her prize. He also sounded wistful as he commented, “If everyone was like her, this would be a much better world.”
Melanie stifled a sigh. “No argument,” she responded.
Finished with his share of the cupcake, Mitch pushed the plate aside and laughed shortly. “Well, that’s a first.”
“And the moment’s gone,” Melanie declared. Taking the empty plate and putting it on top of the one that had initially held the cupcake along with its candle, she told Mitch, “Well, I won’t keep you—”
“Also a first,” he couldn’t help commenting. “Must be some kind of a record.”
Melanie paused to give him a deep, penetrating look, one that silently said she saw right through him. “You make it sound like you don’t want to be here.”
Didn’t exactly take a rocket scientist to figure that one out, Mitch thought. Out loud, he pointed out, “Not exactly my first choice for extracurricular work,” he told her flippantly.
Her eyes met his. “Bluster all you want, Doctor Mitch, but we both know that if you didn’t want to be here, you wouldn’t be here. Maybe you’ve noticed that you’re not exactly handcuffed to a radiator.”
“Bluster?” he echoed, taking offense at the minor insult rather than the larger picture she’d just painted. “I don’t bluster.”
To which she merely smiled. “Remind me to bring a tape recorder with me and run it the next time you’re here. I think you just might need to actually listen to yourself speak—or grunt as the case may be. It just might change your mind about that denial.”
The woman was beginning to sound as if she made her living as a lawyer. And then it occurred to him that he didn’t know all that much about her—not that he had wanted to in the first place. But now that he was stuck coming back here, he figured he might as well know as much about his enemy as possible. One never knew when information like that might come in handy. Considering who he was up against, he might just need it for counter-blackmail somewhere down the line.
“What is it that you do when you’re not bending steel in your bare hands and championing the underdog?” he asked.
Melanie froze for a moment and then tried to behave as if nothing had happened. But he had detected the slight change and wondered about it.
“What do you mean?”
He really doubted that she needed it spelled out for her, but he obliged, wondering at the same time why she was stalling. “Well, everyone here, except for the director, is volunteering their time away from their regular job. I was just wondering what your regular job was?”
“Diva at the Metropolitan Opera House,” she told him brightly.
“I thought as much.” And then Mitch grew serious. “No, really, what are you?”
“Cornered right now,” she told him crisply. Plates and utensils in hand, she headed to the door. “And I’ve got work to do, so happy one month anniversary and if you’ll excuse me—”
With that, she suddenly turned away and left him standing in the room, staring after her. Wondering more questions about the woman than he was really comfortable about wondering.
* * *
Mitch wasn’t the type to ask questions that weren’t directly related to a patient’s condition. He didn’t bother getting involved in a patient’s private life, didn’t entangle himself in the deeper layers that could be unearthed once a few probing questions were actually asked.
So no one was more surprised than he was when he found himself seeking out the shelter’s director rather than just going out to his car in the parking lot and taking off.
It wasn’t as if time hung heavily on his hands. He had more than enough to do to fill up every spare moment of the day and night.
But there he was, knocking at the director’s door, silently calling himself an idiot and just maybe certifiably crazy.
“Yes?” the woman’s voice inquired from within the office.
All thoughts of making a quick getaway and pretending this slip had never happened instantly faded when the door opened and the director looked at him with a welcoming, inquisitive smile.
He might as well see this through, Mitch thought. “You have a minute?” he asked the woman.
“For you, Doctor, always,” Polly responded cheerfully. She gestured for him to come in and take a seat before her desk. Crossing back to her side, she sat down herself. “Is something wrong?” she asked with concern once he was seated.
“No, nothing’s wrong,” he answered.
Yeah, something’s wrong. Melanie’s rubbing off on me, making me ask questions I shouldn’t be asking, shouldn’t even want to know the answers to. Just being around her is messing with my head and I don’t like it.
Mitch forced a smile he didn’t feel to his lips. “I just had question. But if you don’t have any time—” he began, rising again. All he wanted was to make a quick retreat and pretend this never happened—because it shouldn’t have.
“I have time,” she assured him.
So much for a quick retreat.
“Please, sit. Stay,” Polly encouraged, waiting for him to do both. Folding her hands before her on her desk, the thin woman leaned forward slightly, giving him every indication that he had her complete and undivided attention. “Now, please, tell me. What’s your question, Doctor?”
He felt like an idiot. A self-conscious, awkward idiot.
What did he care what Melanie did for a living? When he got right down to it, it was really none of his business what Melanie did for a living or even if she did anything for a living except come here, occupy herself with the women and children who were staying here—and of course, also appointing herself as his unofficial conscience, pricking at it whenever, in her judgment, he wasn
’t keeping on the true path as she saw it.
Her real calling, now that he thought about it, was to be a royal pain in his posterior—and she did that with aplomb.
The silence stretched out. Rather than take it as an omen and say that perhaps they could talk another time, the director seemed to take her cue from it and head in an entirely different direction with it.
“Please, Dr. Stewart, whatever you say here will stay here, I assure you.” Polly lowered her voice, as if that would get her point across more effectively. “You’ve been a complete godsend to these women and children and anything I can do or say, even in the slightest way, to show our utmost appreciation, well, all I can tell you is that you’d be doing me a favor rather than putting me out.”
The director wasn’t going to let up, he could tell. It seemed to be a common malady among the female population in this facility.
With an inward sigh, Mitch asked his question. “I was just wondering if Ms. McAdams has a job outside of the volunteer work she does here.”
“She came to us as an elementary school teacher,” Polly said proudly. Her smile was warm as she added, “That’s why she’s so good with the children here. It’s her background.”
Volunteering here had taught him to listen more closely than he was normally accustomed to. It made him catch things he would have previously ignored or, more to the point, overlooked.
“You said she ‘came to you’ as a teacher. Isn’t she one now?”
“Melanie took a leave of absence after...” Polly’s voice trailed off. She gave no indication that she was eager to pick up the thread she’d intentionally dropped.
Which just served to arouse his curiosity, something he would have sworn just a month ago that he’d learned to eradicate from his life. Obviously he hadn’t erased it; he’d merely painted over it and it was apparently alive and well, just waiting to wake up.
Something else he could hold against Melanie.
“After?” Mitch asked. “After what?”
Polly sighed. “Well, I suppose it’s really not a secret. Melanie will probably tell you herself once she feels ready to address the subject. She only told me because I needed something for the record,” Polly explained.
“Go on,” he urged, trying to sound patient—which he wasn’t.
Why did women have this annoying habit of drawing things out like it was dough and pausing at the most inappropriate times?
“Melanie’s fiancé, Jeremy, was killed while in the service overseas. It happened just four days before he was scheduled to fly back to the States for their wedding. It hit her very hard,” she confided. “Melanie didn’t feel that she had the right frame of mind to teach impressionable young children. Her contact with them here at the shelter is informal and that’s better for her right now. And, of course, the children adore her and selfishly, I don’t know what I would do without her.” Polly paused, unofficially closing the subject. “Does that answer your question for you?”
“Yes,” Mitch told her, rising to his feet. “It does. Thank you for your time.”
“And we thank you for yours,” Polly called after his departing back.
But, his mind elsewhere, Mitch was already out of earshot.
Chapter Six
“So? Tell me,” Charlotte enthusiastically urged her son.
It had been over a month since she’d talked him into volunteering at the homeless shelter that Maizie had told her about. She hadn’t heard from Mitch in all that time. After waiting as patiently as she could, she had decided to take matters into her own hands. Step one was inviting him out to lunch at the restaurant that was near Bedford Memorial.
Step two was getting him to actually talk. Step two was harder than step one.
When Mitch made no response to her question, she tried again. Getting information out of her son took skill and patience.
Lots of patience.
“How is it?” Charlotte pressed, doing her best not to sound impatient.
As if hearing her for the first time, Mitch raised his eyes from the sirloin steak he was enjoying and looked at his mother quizzically. He wasn’t sure what she was asking.
There was no question that he loved his mother. Charlotte Stewart was and had always been a kind, decent woman who could have easily served as a prototype model for the perfect mother in all those old-fashioned sitcoms that used to litter the airwaves when he was a kid.
That being said, there were times when he just couldn’t seem to understand what wavelength his mother was on.
Or maybe he was the one who was on the wrong wavelength. In either case, there were many times that he and his mother couldn’t seem to make a proper connection and he felt bad about that. Bad because he knew that she meant well and she truly wanted nothing more for him than his happiness.
The problem was, he wasn’t sure just what that was, or these days even what “happiness” meant. At least, not where he was concerned.
Hard to achieve something if you didn’t know what it was even if you tripped over it, Mitch thought philosophically.
“It?” he repeated. No enlightenment came with the repetition. Mitch had no idea what she was referring to, but assumed it had to be something in his immediate surroundings. “You mean the steak?” he asked, indicating what he’d ordered for lunch. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until he’d taken his first bite. There was hardly anything left of the meal.
But she hadn’t appeared out of the blue and whisked him off to lunch just to find out how he liked the steak in this restaurant.
Had she?
Mitch continued to look at his mother, waiting for further enlightenment.
“No, dear, I’m talking about your volunteer work at the homeless shelter,” she said patiently, then repeated, “How is it?”
She was genuinely curious about his reaction to what he both did and observed at the shelter. Curious, too, on an entirely different level if Mitch had had any sort of a reaction to the young woman Maizie had told her about, thanks to her friend Theresa. So curious that for the past two nights, she’d hardly slept, wondering how things were—or weren’t—coming along.
Many years ago, when Mitch had been about five or six years old, she had made herself a vow that she wasn’t going to be like all the other mothers. She wasn’t going to be the kind of mother whose offspring cringed at the sound of her voice or the sight of her name on his caller ID. She wanted to be a welcomed participant in her son’s life, not one he sought to avoid.
That meant, for the most part, not taking on a supervisory position when it came to what went on in Mitch’s private life.
But as the years went by, it became clearer and clearer to her that as far as his life went, there really wasn’t anything for her to participate in. Mitch was all about his work.
And when he wasn’t working, he was reading up on the latest studies that were being made in his field.
She realized that she was very lucky to have a son who was intelligent, who had a profession he was absorbed in. She had friends who lamented that their son or daughter partied too much, or spent money as if they had their own printing press stored away in their spare bedroom. Others had adult offspring who acted as if they were still children, focused only on themselves and indiscriminately gratifying all their own whims and extravagances.
She knew she had a hundred reasons to be grateful that Mitchell was the way he was, but human nature being what it was, she couldn’t help wanting something more—for him rather than for herself—because someday, she would be gone and she wanted him to have someone in his life who meant something to him. Someone he could laugh with and talk with, or simply just be with, sharing a room and a comfortable silence with.
Left to his own devices, she knew he’d never reach that goal she had for him. Which was why she’d decided to secretly take matters into her own hands. And now she needed to know how that was going. Needed to know if she had cause for hope—or cause for remorse.
Mitch shrugged careless
ly. “Frustrating,” he finally admitted, summing up his feelings in a single word. He didn’t believe in using three words when one would more than adequately do.
“Why?”
Frustrating wouldn’t have been the first word she would have expected to hear as a reaction from Mitch. She looked at him. Getting information out of him was like pulling teeth. Impacted teeth. “What’s frustrating about it?”
It seemed almost funny to him that the first thing he thought of in response to his mother’s question was the name of the woman who was supposed to act as his assistant at the shelter—or whatever it was that Melanie saw herself as being.
He refrained from mentioning her because he knew his mother wasn’t asking about a person, she was asking about how he felt about the conditions he found there. Even as a doctor’s son, he hadn’t exactly grown up in the lap of luxury. But even despite his father’s untimely and all-too-early death, he had never actually felt the pinch of deprivation. What he saw at the shelter—and what he found himself listening to because sometimes his patients talked even when he hadn’t asked them anything—had left a dark, lasting impression on him.
“Frustrating because there are free clinics located throughout the state and yet a lot of these kids at the shelter have never even had the most common immunizations. This isn’t a developing nation.” He realized he sounded as if he was lecturing and he toned down his voice. “Their mothers should know better.”
Charlotte smiled to herself. Maybe Mitch hadn’t connected with that woman—yet—but he had at least found something to be passionate about. She could see it in his eyes. That was the first, important step, she couldn’t help thinking. At this singular moment in time, he reminded her very much of her late husband. Matthew would have been pleased.
With luck, the rest would follow.
“Sometimes people just fall through the cracks, dear. That’s why I urged you to volunteer at the shelter in the first place,” she told her son. “If you wind up helping at least one person there for no other reward than just because it’s the decent thing to do, then you’ve done a very good thing and I will have done my part in raising you right.”
Dr. Forget-Me-Not (Matchmaking Mamas) Page 6
