by Linda Seed
He had a PPO, so that was good—he could take Owen to anyone he wanted. But choosing someone was another question. He’d have to ask around. In the meantime, he wasn’t even sure when Owen had last had a physical or who his previous doctor had been—both pieces of information a new provider would ask about.
He gathered up his manly resolve and called his ex.
“What do you want, TJ?” Penny sounded tired.
“How’s your mom, Pen?” TJ had custody of Owen—for the time being, at least—because Penny was nursing her mother through multiple catastrophic health issues, including liver disease. Neither of them had wanted Owen to be subjected to that. Adolescence was hard enough, they’d reasoned, without having to watch your grandmother suffer.
“They’re not considering her for a transplant yet,” Penny said. “Which is good, in a way, because it means they don’t think she’s sick enough. But it’s also bad, because nothing else seems to be helping her.”
“I’m sorry.” TJ had never exactly bonded with his mother-in-law, but she and Penny were as close as a mother and daughter could be. He wished there was something he could do, but he supposed he was doing it by taking care of their son so Penny could focus on her mother.
“Yeah. Me too,” Penny said. “How’s Owen? He was supposed to call me last night, but he didn’t.”
“That’s what I was calling about.” TJ gave her the rundown on Owen’s tiredness, his lack of appetite, his waning enthusiasm for school. “When was his last physical?”
“He had one over the summer. He needed an immunization before he could start seventh grade.”
“Ah. And what was his doctor’s name again?”
TJ could feel his ex-wife’s judgment in the long stretch of silence.
“What?” he said.
“Are you sure you’re up to this?” she said. “Being a full-time single parent? Because I’ve got to tell you, TJ, the fact that you’re asking this, when it’s something you should already know …”
“Yeah, yeah.”
TJ brushed her off, but privately, he had to admit she had a point. She’d done everything for Owen before the split. The meals. The school permission slips. Shopping for his clothes when he was shooting up in height at a rate that defied credibility. Getting on him about his chores. And taking him to medical appointments.
TJ had always felt that he was doing his part just by earning a living for his wife and son. It was how he’d been raised—his dad worked hard, brought home a paycheck, and then came home to bask in his family’s love.
In retrospect, it was possible that attitude had something to do with his divorce.
“TJ?” Penny said. “If you need to bring him back here …”
“No. I’ve got this. We’re doing fine, and you need to focus on your mom.” As he said it, he began to feel more certain that it was true. “Just tell me the doctor’s name.”
Penny and her mother lived in San Jose, three hours from Cambria—close enough that Owen could visit his mom, but far enough away that taking the kid to see his old pediatrician was not practical.
TJ and Penny had both grown up in Cambria, and they’d moved up to the Bay Area together after high school. Penny had gotten accepted at San Jose State, and TJ had tagged along because, at eighteen, his imagination had been too small to accommodate anything more than his all-encompassing teenage love for Penny.
She’d studied business management, and TJ had gone to work on a construction crew, a job his dad had set up for him when his parents had been unable to talk him out of leaving. There’d been an electrician on the crew who’d taken an interest in TJ, and that had led to an apprenticeship, trade school, and, eventually, his own business.
Now, eighteen years and one divorce later, here he was, back where he’d started. Well, not exactly where he’d started. He had a son. He had a hell of a lot of life experience. He had work that had been portable for his move back home. And he had an idea that he was well on his way to righting the capsized ship of his life.
The marriage had been a mistake—both he and Penny knew that. But he’d gotten fatherhood out of it, and that was something he would never regret.
He’d spent enough time enjoying the perks of fatherhood without putting in the work. It was time to step up.
He asked around with some of the other parents at the middle school, checked online reviews, looked at education and qualifications on medical practice websites, and finally decided he would take Owen to Bianca Russo’s office for a checkup.
He vaguely remembered someone by that name from high school. Could it be the same one? Likely, he decided. The Central Coast wasn’t well-populated enough to have more than one of them.
After TJ had called and made an appointment for the following week, the idea of Bianca Russo nagged at him. He sort of remembered her, but not very well, and something about that bothered him. He felt like he was missing something, some piece of memory or understanding that was eluding him.
He did what he always did in such situations. He called his mom.
“Hey. Do you remember a Bianca Russo from when I was in high school?” he asked when she picked up the phone.
“Well, hello to you, too, sweetheart,” Lily Davenport said to her son.
“Oh. Uh … yeah.” He scratched his stubble. “I just wondered …”
“Of course I remember Bianca Russo.” Her tone said the question was at least a little bit stupid. “She’s a pediatrician in Morro Bay now.”
“Right. I was thinking of taking Owen to see her.”
“Is he sick?” Lily’s voice registered immediate concern.
“No, no. At least, I don’t think so. He’s just been tired lately, and I thought I’d take him in, just to be safe.”
“Well, that’s sensible.”
“Bianca Russo?” he prompted her. “Did I go to high school with her?”
Lily’s silence told him he was being an ass—he just wasn’t sure how.
“Mom?”
“Yes, Troy, you went to high school with her.” His mother was the only one who still called him Troy. “She had a crush on you.”
“She did?” This was news to him—though, from his mother’s tone, it shouldn’t have been.
“Yes, son, she did. Honestly, men. If somebody’s not wearing a neon sign …”
“What makes you think she had a crush?” TJ asked.
“Intuition,” she said dryly.
“Intuition? That’s all? Mom, I don’t think—”
“Intuition, plus the fact that her mother told me when we were in the PTA together. And the fact that Bianca couldn’t take her eyes off you her whole junior and senior years. And the fact that you broke her heart.”
“I … Wait, a minute. I never …” TJ felt as though he were engaged in a conversation in which only one of them was speaking English, and he wasn’t entirely sure it was him. “What are you talking about? When did I break her heart?”
“When you went on a date with Bianca then started seeing Penny right after. That’s when. Why, Carmela Russo told me the poor thing cried in her room for a week.”
Okay, now TJ was sure there had been some kind of mistake and that his mother must have her stories mixed up. Was she thinking about Greg? His older brother was the one who broke women’s hearts, not him. “I never went out with Bianca Russo. That must have been Greg.”
“It was not Greg. It was you. You went out with her and a bunch of your friends—you went to see that movie with Russell Crowe, the one about ancient Rome, I think it was. I can’t remember the name.”
Gladiator. It was Gladiator. He started to get the uncomfortable feeling that she was right and he was wrong. He’d forgotten Bianca was even there that night.
“That wasn’t a date, though. It was just a bunch of us hanging out.”
“Are you sure?” His mother’s voice carried the weight of judgment.
Increasingly, he wasn’t sure about anything having to do with this conversation. “How cou
ld it have been a date if I didn’t know it was a date?” he asked.
But, the more he thought about it, the more he could see it. Everyone else on that outing had been paired up, hadn’t they? Only he and Bianca hadn’t been. His friend Ray had invited Bianca along, and TJ strained to remember how that had come about. Was it possible he’d been setting TJ and Bianca up? And was it further possible that TJ had been too dense to realize it?
“Oh, jeez,” TJ said as the truth of the situation dawned on him. “I mean, yeah, the others were coupled up, but … I thought she and I were just there on our own. I thought we were the fifth wheels.”
And he hadn’t even remembered that it was Bianca until his mother had mentioned it, though it didn’t seem wise to point that out now. It wasn’t that he hadn’t thought highly of Bianca at the time. It was that he hadn’t thought about her at all. If she’d had a crush big enough that his mother had known about it …
He was starting to feel like an ass.
And, yeah, he’d had his first date with Penny the following weekend. Had Bianca Russo been waiting for him to call her and ask for another date the whole time he’d been planning to make his move on Penny?
It was sobering to think how little TJ understood about the events of his own life.
“Maybe I’d better take Owen to someone else,” he said after a while.
His mother made a noise—something between psshhht and pffft—and he knew he was about to get a lecture. “Troy James Davenport, I thought I raised you better than that. If she’s the best doctor for Owen, she’s the best doctor. Don’t make your son pay the price just because you were an oblivious jerk in your younger years.”
Well. Talking to his mother always seemed to clarify things. Even if what it clarified was the fact that he was an oblivious jerk.
3
TJ had to pull Owen out of school for the appointment because the medical office didn’t have any spots available after school. Predictably, that made the idea of getting poked and prodded much more appealing to Owen.
“It’s cool that I get to miss algebra.” Owen piled into TJ’s truck and buckled himself in. His backpack was so stuffed with books, notebooks, and other belongings that it seemed almost as big as he was.
“What’ve you got in that thing, a body?” TJ asked.
“No, Dad.” Owen scoffed. “Like I’d be dumb enough to carry it around with me instead of getting rid of it. Jeez.”
TJ glanced at his son with a goofy half grin. The kid was funny. Before Owen had come to live with him, he’d never realized that. How had he missed it?
Owen had shot up in height over the past year, but he still had a slight build and a baby face—a child among the half men of middle school. He had a spray of freckles across his nose, and his medium-brown hair seemed perpetually mussed.
And, yeah, the kid’s color was off. He used to have so much bouncy energy he seemed like he was running on rocket fuel, but now he was slumped in the passenger seat, looking like he needed a nap.
TJ turned onto Highway 1 and headed south toward Morro Bay.
Bianca was having a busy morning, and she’d been keeping her head down and focusing on the work.
Maybe that was why she hadn’t seen Troy Davenport and his son in the waiting room. If she had, she wouldn’t have been struck senseless by the sight of him when she walked into the exam room.
She was holding Owen’s chart in her hand, looking down at it, when she walked in.
“You must be Owen,” she said, still scanning the chart. “I’m Dr. Russo. And you’re Owen’s father? It’s nice to—” Her words were cut short when she finally looked up and saw who it was she was talking to.
It was really him—Troy Freaking Davenport.
She hadn’t thought much about him in years, but now that he was standing in front of her, the memories came rushing back: the way he’d looked in a letterman’s jacket and a snug pair of Levi’s. The way his smile had said he was just enough trouble to be hot, but not so much trouble that a person would regret having met him. The way she’d written Bianca Davenport repeatedly on her Trapper Keeper notebooks. The dearly held fantasies she’d had about marrying him one day. And the pure, crystalline devastation she’d felt when he’d taken up with Penny DeLuca.
He’d changed some—his dark hair was glossy and cut close to his head, in contrast to the Zac Efron shag he’d sported in school—but in other ways, he hadn’t changed at all. He still had those startling blue eyes. He was still deliciously tall. And he still had a way of looking at her as though he knew something she didn’t.
She realized that she’d been standing there for some time without saying anything. She’d meant to go forward with her usual routine: introducing herself, establishing the reason for the visit, putting the parent and the patient at ease, etc.
Instead, all she could get out was, “Troy.”
“It’s TJ now. And this is my son.” He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.
Bianca was struck by the fact that Troy—and, by extension, she—was old enough to have a child on the cusp of adolescence. The next thought that hit her was that Troy must be married. She scanned his fingers, but there was no ring.
Divorced? Widowed? She took a look at the chart and saw that he was listed as Owen’s primary caregiver, with an address in Cambria. Under mother, he’d written Penny Davenport: address, San Jose.
Divorced, then. And, Penny? Had he married Penny DeLuca?
She looked at Owen and then at Troy. TJ, she reminded herself. So many thoughts were running through her head that she doubted she could properly diagnose the boy if he’d been attacked by a swarm of bees.
“Could I just … Would you excuse me for a moment? I’ll be right back.” She scurried out of the room, went to where her sister Sofia was sitting at her station behind the reception desk, grabbed Sofia by the arm, and dragged her into an empty exam room.
“What?” Sofia looked alarmed. “Did I mix up the charts again? Damn it, I thought I was doing better. You’re the one who wanted me to work here. I told you I’m not—”
“Troy Davenport is here.” Bianca still had a vise-like grip on Sofia’s arm.
Sofia blinked a few times. “The kid I put in Room Three? The father is …”
“That’s him.”
Sofia had been a freshman at Coast Union High School when Bianca was a senior. It wasn’t surprising that she hadn’t recognized TJ, who had been in an entirely different social circle than Sofia. She’d seen him around, though, and now her eyes widened in recognition.
Sofia slapped a hand to her mouth. “I’m having the wedding you planned for him!”
When Bianca had been a lovestruck teenager, she’d mapped out her fantasy wedding to Troy, and that wedding was the basis for the ceremony Sofia and Patrick would be having next year.
“He’s already been married,” Bianca said. “To Penny DeLuca.”
“The skank he dumped you for?”
“Yep.” Except, Penny hadn’t been a skank. She’d been a regular girl, much like Bianca, probably plagued with the same insecurities and uncertainties. Penny had been pretty, likable … and nice, Bianca remembered with irritation. Hating her would be both fun and convenient, but not exactly fair.
“Is she here, too?” Sofia hissed in a stage whisper.
“No, they’re divorced.”
“Serves him right.”
Bianca was tempted to agree.
Well, that had been interesting.
TJ had thought he might not remember Bianca when he saw her, but he did. Dark, glossy hair, Mediterranean skin, eyes the color of dark chocolate. Seeing her gave him a burst of quick images from high school: Bianca at sixteen with frizzy hair and a sprinkling of acne, trying to fit in but uncomfortable in her own skin.
She’d grown up nicely.
The acne was gone, and so was the frizz, replaced by the smooth gloss of hair tucked into a tidy bun. He wondered what that hair would look like out of the bun, then scolded himself.
He was here for Owen.
He’d doubted what his mother had said about him breaking Bianca’s heart—that wasn’t how he remembered it—but now, seeing her reaction to him, he knew it was true. She’d blushed and stammered, and had hauled ass out of the room as quickly as possible.
TJ liked to think that if her heart had been broken, it hadn’t been his fault. But who the hell knew? He’d been so clueless at that age, anything was possible. He felt a rush of shame over his probable misdeeds, whatever they might have been.
Waiting in the exam room for her to return, TJ looked at his son, who was smirking at him.
“She called you Troy,” Owen said.
“Well … that’s my name.”
“Troy,” Owen said in a singsongy voice, under his breath. The kid seemed to think Troy was one of the most ridiculous names he’d ever heard. Privately, TJ agreed—thus the use of his initials in place of the name. Not that he would ever tell his mother that.
When Bianca came back into the room, she had her game face on. No blushing, no stammering—just the polished persona of a seasoned medical professional.
“I’m sorry for making you wait.” She focused her reassuring smile on Owen. “You say you’ve been tired lately? Let’s see if we can find out what’s going on.”
At the end of the appointment, Bianca reassured TJ that Owen’s fatigue was probably a normal phase of adolescence. Just to be sure, she’d ordered lab work, but she was confident it would show nothing amiss.
She escorted him and Owen out of the exam room, wished them a nice day … and then couldn’t resist milking him for a little information.
“So, are you back in Cambria permanently?” She tried to make the question sound casual—just friendly chitchat.
“I am. I do electrical work, so if you know anyone who needs any …” He reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and extracted a business card, which he handed to her.
