The Family Doctor

by Bobby Hutchinson

  Eliza shook her head, but her mutinous expression belied the denial.

  Kate pulled into the drive of her house.

  “I want Daddy to take me to class next time,” Eliza blurted out as she scrambled from the car. She didn’t wait for Kate the way she usually did. Instead she ran around to the back of the house, to the entrance to the apartment.

  “Change your clothes and come and have some soup—I made that carrot stuff you like,” Kate called after her. So she was a little jealous, Kate realized with a pang of sympathy.

  Seeing McKensy with Tony had probably done it, Kate realized. Scott hardly ever took Eliza to her lessons. Her heart ached for her stepdaughter. Eliza had such difficult situations to come to terms with, and she was only a little girl. Scott had disappointed her so many times, and would again. And there was nothing Kate could do to prevent it.

  She sighed and went inside. Walking into her house never failed to give her pleasure, even when she was feeling sad. She’d painted and decorated her home exactly as she wanted, using various shades of yellow for the living area, from a cheerful sunny color in the kitchen to muted amber in the living room. She loved plants and flowers, and greenery spilled down from an ornate old ladder she’d rested against the kitchen wall. The bamboo table and chairs she’d bought secondhand and then painted white looked inviting in the eating alcove.

  It had taken her a long time to decide what she wanted her home to look like. Married to Scott, she’d been too busy earning their living to pay attention to her surroundings. When she’d bought this house, she’d spent money first on making the basement suite comfortable and bright, particularly Eliza’s bedroom, so the little girl could invite friends home for sleepovers.

  But in the last two years, Kate had begun to work on her own surroundings, and she’d found she enjoyed the process. She haunted secondhand stores and made use of inexpensive items to turn her house into a home. She’d planted a vegetable garden out back, and flowers along the borders, taking heed of the advice in women’s magazines not to wait for a man in her life before making a home for herself.

  Somewhere in the past few years she’d pretty much given up on the idea of ever marrying again. The fact that she couldn’t have children and the situation with Scott and Eliza didn’t enhance her appeal as a desirable partner.

  But tonight, as she heated the soup she’d made that morning and waited for Eliza, she admitted how lonely her life was at times.

  Eliza was wonderful, but Kate longed to have an adult to talk with, to exchange ideas, to confide memories. Being with Tony, even for one brief hour, had emphasized that longing. She missed having a sex life. She knew she’d be passionate with the right man. What happened to passion if it didn’t get used? Did it just dry up and disappear?

  Before she could get too maudlin, she reminded herself that she had Eliza, she had her work, she had her friendship with Leslie. She had a great deal to be thankful for.

  Cultivate an attitude of gratitude here, Lewis. You’ve got another date with him on Thursday, while the kids have dance class.

  It wasn’t a real date, though, she reminded herself.

  It was just a way to pass an hour while the girls were in class. She mustn’t make too much of it.

  She liked it, though. She really liked it.

  “I LIKE ELIZA, PAPA. She’s got a sense of humor.”

  Tony was sitting on McKensy’s bed. She was bathed and ready for sleep, wearing an old rugby shirt of his as a nightgown.

  “A sense of humor’s essential, all right.” Tony had to struggle not to smile. McKensy had been assessing various friends and members of the family for weeks now, gauging their possession of, or lack of, a sense of humor, after seeing a television special on how humor affected illness.

  “Does Kate have a sense of humor?”

  “Yeah, she does.” The memory of Kate teasing him with that engaging twinkle in her eye pleased him. Sitting with her and hearing her talk about her family had been interesting. Her view of people’s actions and her acceptance of their differences was both touching and endearing.

  “Do you like Kate, Papa?”

  “Yeah, duchess, I do. I like her a lot.” Kate’s wide smile and endearing dimples came to mind. There was a softness about her voice and her manner that he found seductive.

  Of course, he wasn’t about to explain the seductive aspect to McKensy.

  “So are you maybe gonna date her?”

  Here there were dragons. Tony knew all too well the desperate need his daughter felt for the kind of family that included a mother and a father, and more children than just one.

  He didn’t want to raise McKensy’s hopes at all.

  “I don’t think so, sweetie. We’re good friends, but dating’s not on the agenda.”

  She tipped her head to one side and gave him an exasperated look. “You’re gonna stay single your whole life unless you date somebody, Papa.”

  Her logic was sound. “I’ll get around to it one of these days.”

  “That’s what you always say.”

  Time to change the subject. “So is your class getting all prepared for the big dance recital coming up?”

  Her gray eyes widened, and her face lit up. “Guess what? I nearly forgot. You’ll never guess.”

  “You got the part of the princess?” He had no idea whether or not there even was a princess in this one, but judging by the two recitals he’d sat through already, it was inevitable. McKensy had wanted desperately to be the princess in the last production.

  “Phooey.” She blew a raspberry and shook her head. “Who wants to be a dumb princess? I get to be the troll. There’s only one and it’s such fun, and I got it.”

  The troll? For an instant, his protective hackles rose and he wanted to blast the idiot who’d cast his enchanting daughter as a troll.

  “I’ll show you how I’m gonna do it.” She started to climb out of bed, and he restrained her.

  “Better wait until tomorrow, honey. It’s pretty late, and you need music to do it properly.”

  She lay down again and she was silent for a moment. “You’re right, Papa. No music tonight. In case Grammy’s headache still hurts.”

  The lightheartedness Tony had been feeling crashed like a suddenly becalmed kite at the mention of his mother. His brother Wilson had paid them a visit that evening, and although McKensy was in her bedroom when the argument started, Tony suspected she’d overheard a good part of it.

  “Tony, I want you to reconsider this ridiculous business of having a dinner for Ford and that woman,” Wilson had pontificated in his loud voice.

  Dorothy had made coffee, and she was pouring mugs for the men and herself. Her lips tightened and her face took on a martyred expression as she took her place beside them at the kitchen table.

  “You and Margaret can come or not, just as you choose,” Tony replied, keeping his voice as even as he could. Kate’s words echoed in his head. Assertive people repeat the same thing calmly until the other person realizes they mean it.

  “I don’t know how you can be so pigheaded about this,” Wilson continued in his pompous voice. “You’re insulting Mother by having anything to do with him.”

  Wilson obviously hadn’t read the same books Kate had.

  “The dinner isn’t open for discussion, and neither are my actions,” Tony said, holding up a warning palm.

  His older brother was oblivious. “Just out of respect for Mother, you ought to cancel,” Wilson insisted.

  Tony was hanging on to his temper by a thread. “That’s not gonna happen, Wilson,” he reiterated in an even tone. “And like I’ve said already, the dinner isn’t open for discussion.”

  “You’re deliberately causing trouble in the family over this,” Wilson accused. “And you’re causing Mom a lot of pain.”

  That was Dorothy’s cue, and she didn’t miss a beat. “Goodness knows I’ve done my best all these years for all of you,” she whined. “And I don’t see how you can go behind my back lik
e this and even think of speaking to that horrible man. He deserted us, he walked out when Georgia was little more than a baby. He has no right to come back now and cause trouble like this.”

  Tony couldn’t stay calm any longer. “He sent money to help support us all,” he stated, knowing that his voice was rising. “You always leave that little detail out, Mom. He could have just disappeared, but he didn’t. He wrote letters and tried to keep in touch.” The usual frustration and anger were building in him. He’d been through this countless times with his mother, and it typically ended with her in near hysterics and him wanting to put his fist through the nearest wall.

  He could have repeated word for word her next salvo.

  “What kind of father leaves his family and goes off to Australia without a backward glance? And takes a precious ring that doesn’t belong to him? My father gave me that ring, and now that floozy your father’s shacked up with is probably wearing it.”

  As happened whenever this subject arose, Dorothy’s voice vibrated with angry passion. “And now you plan to greet him with open arms, as if he never did anything wrong. How can you do this to your own mother, Tony? After all I’ve done for you?”

  He had to bite his tongue until it nearly bled to keep from telling her that the doing was a two-way street. She’d raised them, and she’d worked hard to do it, he didn’t discount that. But for years now he and his brother and sisters had done whatever they could for their mother, financially and emotionally. They’d paid for a trip to Hawaii for her birthday, they’d surprised her with special dinners on Mother’s Day, they’d made certain she had enough money in her pension plan to more than provide for her needs.

  Tony paid her a generous salary for caring for McKensy, and he looked after all the household expenses. But he was coming to realize that Dorothy was like a black hole, which no amount of affection or gifts or money or reassurance could fill.

  Remembering the escalating voices and the loud and angry quarrel that ensued, Tony felt ashamed. He knew by her troubled expression that McKensy had heard at least some of it. Afterward, Dorothy had donned a martyred expression and murmured about a vicious headache, and Tony, as usual, had felt like a jerk.

  “I’m sure Grammy’s head is better by now,” Tony assured his daughter. “If it’s not, I’ll give her something for it and send her to bed early.”

  “Okay.” McKensy’s frown didn’t go away, however. “My grandfather Ford who’s coming to see us? He was your daddy, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Was he nice to you when you were little, like you are to me?”

  “Yes. He was a nice man, and a good father. He is a nice man.”

  “Then why did he steal from my grammy?” McKensy’s gray eyes were puzzled. “She says he took something from her that didn’t belong to him. That’s not right, is it? That’s stealing, right?”

  Tony felt defeated. How did he explain to his child his family’s conflicting views of the same event. “Grammy gave my father a ring when they were married,” he said. “It was a ring that had been passed down in her family from her great-grandfather. When we give something, we don’t expect it back. But Grammy thinks that because my father went to Australia, he should have given the ring back. Because it had been a family heirloom.”

  “What’s an air loom?”

  “It’s something old that has been in a family for a long time and is valued by them because it represents their past.”

  “Do I have any air looms?”

  “You have that photo album Grammy gave you, the one with all the old babies in it.”

  For her ninth birthday in April, Dorothy had given McKensy an ancient album that contained photos of their ancestors as babies and children, rolling hoops and dressed in outlandish costumes. Tony remembered looking at it when he was a child himself. It enthralled his daughter the way it had him, and she’d declared it her favorite gift.

  That was the thing about his mother, Tony thought. She could sometimes do the most original and meaningful things, and at the same time be so narrow-minded and impossible he couldn’t bear to be around her.

  “And of course you have me,” he sighed dramatically, getting up and balancing on his wretched crutches. “Some days I feel old enough to be an heirloom.”

  “Oh, Papa,” she giggled, arranging her stuffed toys all around her in preparation for sleep. “Sometimes you’re so funny. I’m glad you have a sense of humor.”

  Except it doesn’t show often enough. Tony suspected that at St. Joe’s, there were many who considered him grim. Lately he hadn’t found much to laugh about, certainly not with his family. He’d made Kate laugh today, though. The thought pleased him.

  “Could Eliza come over and see Fats’s babies?” McKensy’s pet hamster had produced a litter the day before. “I told her all about them. She said she was gonna ask if maybe she could have one. And I want to show her my room.”

  Dorothy had given McKensy a wall-size poster of a sun-filled forest glen, and made sunny yellow curtains. The window seat was filled with dolls and stuffed animals. The white dresser contained trays of hair accessories and nail varnish. It was all as alien to Tony as the surface of the moon, and a reminder of how much he relied on his mother to fill in the blanks for him.

  “Sure, Eliza can come if she wants to. If Kate says it’s okay.” And why couldn’t he ask Kate over to see his room? The ridiculous lewdness of that brought a crooked grin to his lips, and when he went downstairs he was able to greet his mother with a kiss and a cheerful remark.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “LESLIE, GOOD MORNING, c’mon in. Have a cup of tea, the kettle’s on.” Kate looked up from her computer with a smile that faded as she got a closer look at her friend’s face. “What’s wrong, Les? You look pretty down.”

  Leslie closed the door of Kate’s office and sank into a chair. “I had to bring Mom into Emerg last night.”

  “Is she okay? What was wrong?”

  “When I got home yesterday, she was dizzy and staggering around. I was scared she’d fall and break her hip again. She’d been nauseous, and her right eye was moving involuntarily—nystagmus,” Leslie explained, giving the symptom its proper medical label. “As you know, nystagmus can relate to an inner ear disorder, or it might also be a neurological symptom.”

  “Was she admitted?” Kate set a cup of peppermint tea in front of Leslie.

  “Nope.” Leslie shook her head. “Hersh was on, that new guy that nobody likes.”

  Kate nodded. She’d already heard more than a few complaints about the new resident in Emerg. Nathanial Hersh was young and supremely confident, which was a good thing in an ER physician who was called on to make snap decisions. But from the reports Kate had received, Hersh was also impatient and brash, unwilling to listen to anyone else’s input. He wasn’t a team player.

  “He examined Mom, and he diagnosed labyrinthitis.”

  “Ear inflammation?”

  Leslie nodded. “She’s had a case of the flu, and she’s still a bit stuffy. He gave her some antibiotics and sent us home, even though I asked him if he’d admit her and run a few more tests. At her age, the same symptoms could easily indicate something a lot more serious. But he was definite about the diagnosis. He as much as told me to butt out and let him do his job. I got mad and said some things maybe I shouldn’t have, but I felt he was way too casual and offhand about the diagnosis.”

  “So you’re mad at him and you’re worried about Galina.”

  Leslie gave an emphatic nod. “You better believe it. She seemed a little better this morning, but it’s hard to tell. I got one of my neighbors to stay with her today.”

  Seeing how agitated Leslie was, Kate felt anxious herself about Galina. She was fond of the older woman. “Can you maybe get your family doctor to make a house call?”

  Leslie shook her head. “Wouldn’t you know he’s on holiday, and Mom won’t agree to see a stranger. You know how stubborn she can be.”

  Kate nodded, pondering what
she could do to help. “Do you want me to drop by after work?”

  “Thanks, Kate,” Leslie said after a moment’s hesitation, “but I really don’t think it would make a difference.”

  “What would make you feel better about this?” It was a question Kate asked constantly.

  “I don’t know,” Leslie admitted after some thought. “I just have this bad feeling that I can’t seem to shake.”

  “If I can help in any way, just ask.”

  A sharp knock at the door surprised them both.

  Kate got up and opened it.

  “Hi, Tony.” She masked the surprise she felt. He’d never come to her office before. They always met in his, or at meetings. “C’mon in. You know Leslie Yates.”

  “I sure do. Hi, Leslie.” He nodded and smiled, but he looked uncomfortable. “I should have called instead of just dropping by, Kate. You’re busy, I’ll come back another time.”

  “I’ve gotta be going right this minute,” Leslie said, getting to her feet. “It’s probably bedlam down in the ER.” She gave them a distracted wave and hurried out the door.

  “Sit down, Tony.” Kate indicated the seat Leslie had just vacated. “I see you got rid of the crutches.” He was using a cane instead.

  “Yeah, the more I exercise this, the faster it’ll get better. Sorry to barge in on you,” Tony said, sinking down in the chair. “I’m here with a message from my daughter. She wanted me to ask if Eliza could maybe come home with her after dance class on Thursday. I think it has something to do with the hamster’s babies. And I have to warn you, McKensy’s looking for foster homes for them.”

  Kate laughed. “Sure, she can come. I’ll check with her father, but I don’t see why not. As far as the hamster goes, I half promised Eliza one for her birthday, anyway. It’s coming up in July.”

  He nodded and smiled. “McKensy will be thrilled. And I’ll drive Eliza home right after dinner.”

  Silence fell. He was a big man, Kate noted. Her office, already cramped, seemed to shrink still further with him in it.

  “I like that print.” He motioned at the wall. “It’s one of my favorites.”