by W. Ferraro
“Don’t preach to me about let things go,” Hunter hissed, trying to keep the conversation and topic private.
Gage stood to his full height, which was a couple inches taller than Hunter was, and made Hunter stop in his tracks. “You are completely right. I carried around so much pain for so long that I almost lost the best couple of things to ever enter my life,” Gage said sincerely. But then, all the warm and fuzziness of his approach was gone. “And it was you who helped me realize that I couldn’t let my pride run the show anymore. But God, Hunt! Don’t you think twenty years is long enough? You never told me what caused you to run off with Allison when I knew you were so set to finally confessing to Molly how you felt, but I can guess. If my hunches are right, and they usually are right on, then I’m telling you to let it go!” Gage stepped toward the door, placing his aviators back on his face and turned to say with his own level of annoyance and sarcasm, “Shit happens. Not everyone is as perfect as you! Give them a break or give them up. The choice is yours, but it is about damn time it is one or the other.”
Hunter stood there rendered quiet except for the sudden solidarity of the room and the words that hung over him.
He carried Gage’s words and advice, if you can call it that, with him as he started his shift. First stop was the board listing the waiting patients at the nurses’ station of the emergency room.
“Good morning, Dr. Dennison!” Deb, one of the ER’s constant fixtures, said in greeting, never looking up from her computer screen as she showed her unique and great ability for multitasking.
“Morning, Debbie. Has Dr. Moras been to exam room three to see Ms. Dorsch? She is in need of a surgical consult ASAP.”
“I’ll page her, doctor.”
Hunter continued reading through what appeared like an endless amount of reports, placing his signature everywhere it seemed, all before he had even seen one patient.
Finally, when he was able to start his rounds, they did not promise to lighten his mood. An overextended back, a power drill through a hand, two cases of kidney stones, an overdose, and finally, stitches for a young boy who thought he was Tony Hawk.
Taking a moment for himself, he walked to the nurses’ station, leaning against it with both elbows on the counter, and rubbed his temples. There was a massive headache beginning to pulsate behind Hunter’s eye. This did not bode well for an eighteen-hour shift.
The ambulance pulled into the bay and Hunter turned to intercept the incoming patient. He should not have been surprised by the sight of his brother, Mason, considering he was a certified EMT but seeing his firefighter brother come in with a patient just wasn’t something he got used to.
The patient was removed from the back of the ambulance and rolled in through the automatic doors.
“Hey, doc,” Mason greeted overly happy as he opened his eyes wide voicing to his brother the agony he had already endured.
When Hunter got a look at who the patient was, he knew his day wasn’t going to get any shorter, better, or easier.
Mason, along with Jamie, another firefighter and also Mason and his twin Casey’s best friend, wheeled the stretcher into the first available room. Quickly hightailing it out of the way, he allowed Hunter to see to his patient.
“Good morning, Ms. Chamberlain! Just couldn’t stay away from my smiling mug, could you?” Hunter remarked knowing this cantankerous woman would be giving him and everyone else in the ER a verbal licking at any moment.
“You listen to me. I don’t care how many letters you have after your name or how many fancy degrees you have on your wall at home, I’m gonna tell you just like I told them nosy boys who brought me in. I don’t need to be here! I am not having a heart attack! I didn’t fall and couldn’t get up! It is just the stupid battery in this stupid white box that my too-busy-for-her-own-mother daughter insists that I wear around my neck.” The gray-haired woman shrieked as one of the nurses tried to check her blood pressure and another tried to take her cane from where it lay next to her on the stretcher.
Hunter took a deep breath, knowing it wouldn’t help.
“Get away from me!” she hollered at the nurses. Gripping her never far from her side cane, she rudely turned from the nurses and faced Hunter straight on. “I want to go home right now!”
Hunter cursed his Hippocratic Oath.
“Well, I can’t do that right now, Ms. Chamberlain. You see, you may think it is the battery in your life alert device, but the truth is your blood pressure is out of whack and you are showing some other signs of cardiac stress. So, just sit back and enjoy your time with me. After all, you know how much I enjoy our twice-weekly visits here in the ER.”
“Don’t be sassing me, young Dennison,” the feisty woman said as she clutched her beloved cane.
This was when Hunter put all niceties aside.
Grabbing for the cane, he pressed it into the mattress. “I’m not sassing you, but I cannot allow you to wield this thing like you are the winner of a home run derby with my staff like the last time. You gave Nurse Belinda a fractured forearm.”
At the mention of her previous antics, the mean old woman stopped her aggressive behavior but that didn’t apply to her tongue. She continued to bark and make snide remarks one after another until Hunter finally left the room.
Mason and Jamie were still there waiting, trying to keep the smiles from their faces but failing miserably, considering the laughter they were both choking on.
“Keep laughing Tweedle dee and Tweedle dum and I might just have you two escort her back home.”
That effectively had the two firefighters dialing down their humor.
Hunter issued some orders to the waiting nurse before turning back to the Bobbsey twins.
“So, how come you are riding the ambo today?” Hunter asked as he took a long swig from the water bottle he kept nearby.
Mason, the only other Dennison sibling who could give Reed a run for his money when it came to sarcasm, wit, and an unabashed sense of being God’s gift to the softer sex. However, unlike Reed, who kept his personal life very close the vest, Mason was happy to put it out there for all to see. With his dark hair and dark eyes, unlike Hunter’s, he was as comfortable in his skin as he was with the opposite sex. Never the type to last long in relationships but that didn’t stop him from giving another the ol’ college try a day or two later.
Regardless that his lively personality never seemed to know or acknowledge limits of appropriateness, unless, of course, their mother was present. He was loyal to a fault and the best kind of guy to have your back when you were in a tight spot.
“You want the honest answer or the best answer?” Mason asked knowing how easily he could rile his stiffer older brother.
“If there is a difference, I really probably don’t want to know,” Hunter mumbled exasperatedly. “Hope you guys have some time, it is going to be a bit before I can get you your stretcher back. Unless, of course, you wanted to go in and ask Ms. Chamberlain to move her stubborn ass, blondie?” Hunter said jovially to Jamie.
Jamie Dwyer was whom all the Dennison brothers considered their fifth brother. He had moved to Clearwater Falls with his grandparents when twins turned three and had been around ever since. They met at the playground and have been chumming around with Mason and Casey ever since. If you were looking for one, you always found the other two. Right before high school graduation, his grandmother passed away leaving Jamie, just shy of his eighteenth birthday, alone. Grady and Bianca Dennison knew how to rectify that immediately. They became his legal guardians until he came of age.
All three attended UNH together before applying to the Firefighters Academy together. Hell, they even all lived together in a loft apartment that was the old Fabric Mill. It became a running family joke that Mason and Casey weren’t twins but rather triplets with Jamie.
When family was called, Jamie was included—no ifs, ands, or buts.
“I’m good, thanks. After all, you know me. I’m not a ladies’ man like you Dennison’s,” Jami
e answered modestly.
Uncaring of their environment or that they were two grown men, Mason gave a comment calling out Jamie’s declared modesty followed by a friendly punch to the midsection which concluded with a scrappy scuffle.
Hunter prayed for patience.
“Knock it off! Unless either of you wants a bed next to our favorite patient.”
“Such a tight ass, doc,” Mason goaded. “Tell you what, keep the stretcher. I’ll take one of the hospital’s extras and Jamie and I will get an early lunch over at Molly’s.”
Neither Mason nor Jamie noticed the sudden reaction Hunter had at the mere mention of the restaurant’s name. Nor did Mason know the poke to the hornet’s nest his next comment would apply.
“Yeah, I could use some eye candy to go along with my cup of coffee.”
Hunter reacted before he even knew it.
He slapped Mason upside the head, hard. “Be respectful! You will not go gallivanting all over town. Either wait here or go back to the station or I will call your captain.”
Mason’s eyes went wide at his brother’s unexplained sudden anger, but he knew better than to push Hunter when he was at his limit.
Goading was fine, but Hunter wasn’t known for backing down when his back was against the wall, either.
“Back to the house it is,” Mason said slowly stepping backward with his hands raised in surrender. Jamie followed, leaving Hunter alone with the stares of those few staff members around him at his out-of-character outburst.
Great!
Hunter left the constant activity of the ER and headed back into the lounge, grateful when it was empty. He walked in a tight circle in the locker area with his hands folded on top of his head, stopping when he faced his reflection in the mirror.
You might as well just broadcast your constant obsession over Molly to the whole town.
That is if they don’t already know.
Really staring at the mirror, he realized that he didn’t like the reflection staring back at him.
Gage is right. It is time to bury the past and move forward.
Hearing someone enter the lounge, Hunter fixed his tie and washed his hands. After drying them with a paper towel, he stared for another moment and mused inwardly.
Who the hell knows what moving forward will bring, but at least it is a direction.
The Tylenol just wasn’t cutting it anymore. Molly’s brain felt as if it was vibrating from the inside out. This was the third day and it was just about enough to have Molly throwing in the towel.
Looking at the clock over the swinging doors to the kitchen, she felt herself cringe knowing that she still had the dinner rush and then some before she would be able to head upstairs for the night.
She watched as Sammy sat at the counter quietly doing her homework. Sammy never argued or gave her lip about Molly’s rules. She happily did as she was told, enjoying the tall glass of milk and two cookies that went along with such good behavior.
Molly wished she could say the same about Jess.
Over the last few months, it had become an unending uphill battle with Jess, and today was Molly’s breaking point.
Jess was always voicing how she didn’t have any freedom and was expected to follow the same rules that her kid sister did. Constant babbling about the unbreathable reign Molly held over her oldest.
Molly knew some of Jess’ anger was usual growing up female stuff, but there was something else eating away at her daughter. It was starting to feel as if Molly didn’t even know her own child.
Jess had always been such a sweet, fun-loving child, always eager to share a smile or giggle with anyone she crossed paths with. Her mother’s constant shadow; you were unable to tell where Molly ended and Jess began. But those days seemed long gone. The young woman Jess was now was more cynical, and at times disrespectful, than the happy, beautiful charming daughter she had known.
One of their most recent arguments was over Jess no longer wanting her mother to pick her up every day from school. She wanted to walk, like most of her friends do.
Molly understood Jess’ feeling, so she thought she came up with a reasonable compromise.
Given the close proximities of the schools in town, Jess, whose school got out at 1:55pm, was able to walk over to the elementary school and pick up Sammy when she got out at 2:10pm. On the days that they didn’t go to Bob’s, she could walk home. On the days that they did, they would have to board the bus together and head over to the other side of town.
This would give Jess some of the independence she so boisterously demanded, yet still emphasized the responsibility factor Molly wanted to drill into her.
However, Jess was unhappy with this arrangement and today she proved how unfair she thought it was, crossing a line as far as Molly was concerned.
Knowing the amount of time it took for them to walk from the elementary school to the restaurant, Molly became worried when it was twenty minutes past when they should have arrived.
She began calling Jess’ cell phone, but it would just ring then go to her voicemail. She texted her, but those went unanswered, too.
Molly was just about to get into her car when Sammy walked in. The sudden relief she felt at the sight of her youngest was quickly snuffed out and replaced with concern. Sammy had tears running down her dirt spotted face, and she now sported a limp.
“Sammy, sweetie, what’s the matter? What happened?” Molly asked, getting down on her knees and embracing her child. “Where’s your sister?”
Through sniffles and hiccups, Sammy began to tell her mother how Jess and a group of her friends, most Sammy hadn’t recognized, were outside her school when she got out. Jess and her friends began walking as they talked and laughed most of the way completely unaware that Sammy was trailing behind. When the group reached Duncan Street, they turned left. Jess and Sammy didn’t usually walk that way; they always walked Main Street all the way. It was longer but required no trespassing through people’s yards. Sammy called for Jess, telling them that she didn’t want to go this way, but either Jess ignored her or when she did finally acknowledge Sammy’s continuous pleas, Jess turned on her, telling her to shut up and just walk.
Sammy watched as the older kids cut through the narrow channel between Andreoli’s farm and Mr. Endicott’s yard, not even waiting to ensure that Sammy followed. Sammy straggled behind, unable to keep up with the teenagers’ much larger strides. Jess and her friends had just squeezed through the fence and were already over the large rocks behind the library when Sammy fell. Her ankle twisted in a hole, and she fell to the ground, scratching her palms and knees on the rock speckled ground. She called out for her sister, but Jess just kept walking, never breaking stride.
Sammy was finally able to pull herself up, but it pained her to put any weight on her ankle. She slowly hobbled toward the hole in the fence. As she tried to squeeze through it, her backpack became snagged on the jagged chain link. She pulled and pulled, but she was stuck. Between the pain of her ankle and the stinging of her palms, Sammy began to cry even harder than she already was. She called for Jess again, but she could no longer see or hear the group of teenagers. She yelled for help, but nobody came. Finally, she was able to wiggle herself free of her backpack, pulling the now torn bag from the fence and crawling over the landscape boulders where she was able to limp through the library parking lot and the short block to Molly’s.
When Sammy finished telling her mom all that happened, Molly didn’t know if she wanted to cry with her youngest or ground her oldest for life.
Molly brought Sammy into the kitchen, where she cleaned up her cuts and gave her the magical ingredient to guarantee a quick recovery, a mother’s kiss, and now here sat a bounced back Sammy none the worse for the wear.
Jess still wasn’t answering her phone or responding to texts, which was one of Molly’s cardinal rules.
Finally, at half past six, Jess walked through the restaurant’s front door. A tactic she only ever did when she knew she was in trouble.
But Molly was faster than Jess expected.
Jess was on the fourth step when Molly walked through the door.
“Get back down here, young lady, this instance!” Molly barked.
Usually, it wasn’t Molly’s style to have personal business between her and the girls occur in the restaurant, but she didn’t care. Sammy was upstairs, and considering what happened today, she didn’t want to upset her by arguing with Jess in front of her.
Jess continued up the stairs.
Greg and the kitchen staff made themselves busy.
Molly walked the short distance to the bottom of the stairs and, with her hand on the banister post, she yelled, “Jessica Ann Jenson! You get your ass down here right now!”
The tone and intention of Molly’s voice had Jess stopping. In dramatic form, she stomped down the stairs to where she was two steps above her mother. Looking down, she snapped back, “What!”
“You know damn well what! How dare you take my trust and stomp on it. I don’t know what has gotten into you lately, but this is the last straw.”
Jessica rolled her eyes and crossed her arms telling her mother exactly what she thought of this conversation.
“Do you have any idea what happened to your sister or are you that conniving that you knew she fell and you left her there because God forbid you tell your friends to stop long enough to help.” Molly steamed, “The fact that you went by Andreoli’s farm is bad enough, after I’ve specifically told you that I don’t want you cutting through Mr. Endicott’s yard because of his dogs, but then you leave your little sister behind just to save face with your friends. I raised you better than this.”
At the mention of Sammy getting hurt, Jess’ face did register shock. Molly believed that she didn’t know, but that didn’t rectify the fact that they shouldn’t have been there in the first place and that she left Sammy behind.
