The Promise

by Robyn Carr

  He sat heavily. He rubbed his temples with a finger and thumb. “Jesus.”

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He shook his head, pinching his eyes closed hard. She’d seen Ted in his worst moments, overpowered by enormous stress, and this expression he was wearing was completely new to her. Without looking at her, he spoke. “Krissy is going to spend a little time in a residential hospital. Hopefully, just a month.”

  “Residential?”

  “My daughter is in serious trouble,” he said.

  Was Ted finally getting it? Of course she was in trouble. That’s why Peyton was here.

  “Maybe a different school after that. Maybe a boarding school next, but nearby so she can come home as often as she likes. I’m okay with her being here, but she might need more....” His words tapered off, and then his finger and thumb were on his eyes. His shoulders began to heave. And then he cried!

  She reached out for the hand that rested on the table. “Ted?”

  Although he concealed his tears with his fingers, she could see he was distraught. He gathered up his strength from within, gave a cough and a little huff. “Ah,” he said. “Sorry.” He cleared his throat and looked at her through red-rimmed eyes. “You can’t imagine what I had to hear today. Do you know how Krissy got in this mess?” he asked.

  “I assumed, the usual way.”

  “I hope it wasn’t the usual way. My daughter has been in a lot of pain. Did it seem like that to you? Because I knew she could test my limits. I knew she could get in trouble. Fifteen-year-olds don’t have much common sense most of the time. But Krissy hasn’t been a normal teenaged girl. She was a girl with a plan. She was either going to have herself a baby or kill herself. And since boys her age are more than willing to cooperate with indiscriminant girls who are looking for sex, the baby idea won over the messy and painful suicide idea. And do you know why?”

  Peyton, dumbfounded, just shook her head.

  “Because no one loves her. Because in her whole life, she couldn’t think of one person who really cared about her. And she thought if she had a baby, that baby would love her. She assumed this because she loves her mother and father...even though she was sure we didn’t love her. And not just us—no one. Not an aunt or teacher or fellow student.” He shook his head. “I thought she was popular. I thought she felt well liked and...well, and loved.”

  Peyton was not only not shocked by this revelation, she was disgusted that he was. “Teenagers are very fragile, Ted. They need a lot of consistency and support. All teenagers feel unloved and unaccepted from time to time in their peer groups, even the ones who are popular. Their maturity level is low and their insecurities very high.”

  “Enough to kill themselves?” he asked in a desperate whisper.

  She made a sad face. “It’s a growing problem.”

  He sighed deeply, trying to compose himself. “I can walk into an exam room, and I can read a patient in seconds. I know if they’re lying, if they’re terrified, if they just don’t care. I can tell if they’re exaggerating, dramatizing or if they’re having symptoms they’re not talking about because they don’t want them to exist. If I can talk with them for ten minutes, we can almost always get on the same team. Hell, I don’t even need the patient—I can look at the chart, the blood, the tests, and I know if they were misdiagnosed or if they need more than I can give them.”

  “You’re known for that. You dazzled me with your perception. I think that’s what I fell in love with—your sensitivity and brilliance.”

  “But my own daughter is in life-threatening danger, and I didn’t see it.”

  Peyton chewed her lower lip for a moment. She knew it was risky, but she decided it was time to be brutally honest. “I didn’t think you cared.”

  “I care,” he said. “I love my kids.” Then he shook his head. “I didn’t see how to connect the dots, Peyton. What does making off with someone’s sweater or deleting their TV shows have to do with desperation? I thought you were overreacting. I thought they were typical kids, missing curfew, changing plans without telling anyone, resisting authority.”

  “If you’d been here more, if you’d been the one whose personal property disappeared or whose shows were deleted, you might’ve asked yourself why they refused to follow the simplest rules, why they were acting out. They hated me because you loved me. They want their parents.”

  “Olivia...”

  “Uh-uh,” she said shaking her head. “You can try putting this off on Olivia, but that will only cost you valuable time. Right now, if you love them, you better figure out how to be a parent to them.”

  “When you were leaving me, you said I was emotionally unavailable.” She nodded. “That’s what the counselor said. She said my daughter didn’t bring her problems to me because my door was closed. Is that true? That my door was closed?”

  Peyton nodded. “The same way the door closes when you leave the patient in the exam room. You did your ten or fifteen minutes of assessment, gave them the protocol and the drugs and left. You don’t have to live with them, hold them while they cry, sit up at night with them when they’re scared—your job was done. You’re done until they show up in the ER or make another appointment.” She took a breath. “That’s not how you parent. Parenting is full-time.”

  “I thought I was a full-time father. I took them to Disneyland.”

  She laughed at him. “We took them to Disneyland. They had a blast. You should have seen them. But you were on your laptop or cell phone most of the time.”

  He groaned.

  “Listen, I understand you’re programed to have a lot of little minions taking care of the grunt work. There’s no other way you could have a practice as important and successful as you do—you need a lot of help. The thing is, you can hire babysitters and housekeepers and teachers—you can’t do it all. You can’t be aware of what’s happening with your kids all the time, but you damn sure have to perfect a way of finding out as much as you can, or you’re not only going to miss out, you’re going to miss something really important. Like Krissy’s desperation to be loved.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “No. But then, the kids didn’t reveal themselves to me—they pushed me away. They resented me so much. And when I tried to provide boundaries, you laughed me off. But, Ted, don’t worry now. You can get some training. Now, while there’s still time to help Krissy and time to keep from losing the other two.”

  “You have no idea what it was like to hear my daughter say those things,” he said, his eyes growing watery again. “I had a mental image of seeing her dead.”

  “You must have been terrified.”

  “And guilty and ashamed and mortified. So filled with regret I couldn’t even speak. I don’t know what to do next. I don’t think they know I love them.”

  “My mother always said there are only two things you have to tell your children. That you love them and you’re so glad you have them. But she also said, if you don’t make them do chores, you’ll ruin them. They won’t be able to live in the world. Her parenting philosophies are pretty simple, but she knows each one of her eight children down to the soles of our feet.”

  “Let’s take the kids out to dinner tonight. Someplace they like.”

  “Ted, I can’t do this for you. It has to be your family now.”

  “I understand. You’re right. But before I have to go cold turkey, let’s go out to dinner. We’ll go early. Then if you want to drive down to the farm, you won’t get there too late.”

  She thought about it for a moment. It was Thursday. Right now she was desperate for the farm, if only to recover a little and get her bearings. “I’ll hang around till Pam and Nicholas come home from school, until Krissy gets up from her nap. I want to tell the kids goodbye, but then I’m leaving. You take your kids out. Or even better, order something to be delivered. You guys have talking to do. I want to have a couple of days with my mom—she always sets me straight. And I want to get to Thunder Point by Sunday, so I
’m ready to get back to work by Monday morning.”

  “Is that all it is? Work?”

  “It’s a good job, Ted. It’s very satisfying.”

  “That doctor, is he a good doctor?”

  She nodded. “He’s amazing. He has to take care of a whole town with a wide variety of problems, and they don’t have as many resources as a lot of people do. He can’t just refer them all the time. You have no idea how they’ve come to depend on him.” She smiled. “And he can’t identify rashes at all. He has an online program to help him.”

  “Does he have children?”

  She nodded. “Small children. They’re four and five, and their mother is deceased.”

  Ted whistled. “Is he good at that, too?”

  “Outstanding.”

  “What does he do that’s so outstanding?”

  “Well...he lets them make the dining-room table into a fort with lots of blankets, and he gets in it with them. Sometimes he falls asleep there. If he has a babysitting problem, they come to the clinic and watch their movies or read books while he sees patients. Most of all, he talks to them and keeps them very close.”

  “And that’s good?”

  “It’s the kind of stuff kids remember...sleeping in the fort, reading stories, digging holes on the beach, watching Dad at work....”

  “I’m a fool. I blew it with you,” Ted said.

  “I don’t know about that, Ted. I’m sorry about what Krissy’s going through, what you’re going through, but I think where you and I are concerned, we’re in better places. You have a second chance with your family that you wouldn’t have if someone was taking care of it for you. And I like the direction my life is going.”

  Eighteen

  “What do you hear from Peyton?” Devon asked Scott during a quiet moment in the clinic. The last scheduled patient of the day had left, and it was just the two of them. Scott would stay a little longer while Devon rounded up their kids. “I thought she’d be back by now.”

  “She texted that she’s spending a couple of nights with her folks at the farm,” he said, not making eye contact.

  “Texted?” Devon asked. “Have you talked to her?”

  “We’ve talked a couple of times....”

  “A couple of times?” Devon asked.

  “She’s been very busy with whatever Ted has her doing.”

  “Well, I don’t think it was Ted, exactly. I got a pretty long email from her while she was sitting in the reception area of a counselor’s office waiting for one of his screwed-up kids to finish a session. She said it was a messy and complicated situation, and she’d explain later. So, what was the situation?”

  “I have no idea,” Scott said.

  “How can you have no idea?”

  He finally looked up. “I take it Ted’s daughter, a fifteen-year-old, is pregnant. I assume Ted couldn’t handle it. Beyond that, I didn’t ask.”

  “Why didn’t you ask?”

  He sighed. “There needs to be more? If she had wanted me to know, she would have told me.”

  “Or maybe she wanted you to ask!”

  “I’ll ask when I see her,” he said. “In fact, I’ll try to arrange it so I can ask her when you’re around, so you can get the answer, too.”

  “Wow, you’re so irritable. You miss her, I guess.”

  “Of course I miss her,” he said. Then he looked at Devon with earnest eyes. “Listen, I know you love Peyton. She’s been amazing here and I hate to see her go, but I think we should be realistic. I don’t think she’s going to stay here.”

  “Oh? Really? Is she going to take that job in Seattle?”

  “She hasn’t said. But there’s also San Francisco, near her sister. She and her sister are very close, and there’s a new baby.”

  “What did she say to make you think she won’t stay here?” Devon asked. “Because I kind of got the impression she was real happy here.”

  “I think this worked out for her for a while. But we know it’s not the pay she deserves, and her talents exceed the needs of this little clinic.”

  “I’ve never heard her complain,” Devon said. “You’re acting weird. You’re hiding something.”

  “I’m not hiding anything, don’t be ridiculous. I think that if we’re practical, we should accept that Peyton has bigger fish to fry.”

  “What fish? See, you’re being very strange. I’ve gotten pretty close to Peyton, and she never mentioned any bigger fish to me.”

  Scott took a deep breath. “It’s very reasonable that Peyton would be attracted to a high salary, and she can command one. It’s not a crime to like nice things. I like nice things, too, but this is more my speed. This is where my heart is. I happen to like what I do. But Peyton grew up a poor farm girl. I’m sure she’s striving for a lot more, and I don’t blame her.”

  Devon was staring at him. Her mouth hung open. “Did you really just say that?”

  “Say what? I just said a lot of things.”

  “Scott, Peyton isn’t motivated by material wealth. And she’s not a poor farm girl....”

  He chuckled. “I guess that car is just a red herring....”

  “That car of hers isn’t that big a deal to her. She said she kind of regrets it. But forget about the damn car—she’s thirty-five and in a high-end career field. She hasn’t had anyone to spend her money on except her parents and nieces and nephews. She bought herself some nice things. But not because she’s a poor farm girl!”

  “I don’t know about that....”

  “Well, I do! Is that what you think? That Peyton is just a poor girl who has wanted some rich stuff her whole life?”

  “I admit, I considered that possibility.”

  “Well, I think you’re very shortsighted. Maybe blind. I’m going to do you a big favor. I’m going to get the kids and take them out to my house. I’ll get them fed.”

  “I have to take them with me to the game tonight. I’m the team doc, you know that. You’re going with me, right? So if I’m needed for an injured player, there’s someone for the kids?”

  “Of course I am. But right now I think you should do yourself a favor and research a couple of things. You don’t know your girlfriend. She knows you, but you don’t know anything about her.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “Start by researching farms,” she said, pointing at the computer. She pulled the strap of her purse over her shoulder. “Maybe Oregon farms.”

  “I’ve been to the farm, Devon.”

  “You went to the farm and still didn’t see it? Remarkable. I’ll see you at the house. If you have time, run by your house and grab some hoodies for the kids—it will probably be cold out there tonight.”

  “Sure,” he said. “See you in a while.”

  “Google, Scott.”

  “I have some patient notes to look over.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said. And then he thought he heard her mumble something that sounded like idiot as she went out the door.

  Stubbornly, he sat at her desk, looking through his notes on the computer rather than getting online. He’d keep the office open for a little while longer in case someone stopped by. He finished his charting, but it was too early to go over to Devon’s to drive them all to the game....

  So he looked up Oregon farms. Whoa. He read that the industry was worth over five billion dollars? Okay, fine—divided by several thousand farmers, right? Chief producer of Christmas trees, pears, berries, right up there with potatoes. Most of the farms were family owned.

  He plugged in Lacoumette and came up with lots of references. Big family, involved in local and community services, business and politics. There was the winery—Uncle Sal, as he recalled. Lacoumette Farms? Oh, boy. It was one of the biggest farms in Oregon. So big that it would dramatically affect the agricultural economy if it collapsed.

  Then there were articles about their product. Pears, potatoes, berries, wool. One of the most successful family-owned farms in the state, its profits were estimat
ed in the millions.

  But Peyton had told him how she grew up. They were all required to work very hard. Paco took them from the breast to the field. She worked through college. The house was not ostentatious——it was an ordinary farmhouse. Modest. It was built to accommodate a very large and ever-growing family, but it was far from upscale. The trucks he saw around the place were old and looked like hell. And now that he knew Paco and Corinne, he found it hard to believe they spoiled their kids, flung money at them. Their kids were forced to earn their way.

  Damn, he thought. She’s right, Peyton’s right. When we talk about this, I’m going to feel really stupid.

  He realized he’d been jealous of Ted’s car, for Christ’s sake. He wouldn’t have one of those cars if it was forced on him! So, how was he going to explain thinking Peyton would be drawn to it? He’d been jealous of Ted, his tall good looks, his money, his car and all that diminished him and caused him to act like a fool.

  This wasn’t going to be easy to fix. Especially since he was a fool. And there was no excuse for it, either. If he thought about it for thirty seconds, he knew Peyton better than that. She was genuine and valued the things in life that were really important! She liked the feel of small children hugging her legs, cannoli delivered in a brown sack by a man who knew about her sweet tooth, a walk on the beach, a road trip with hours alone to talk.

  He shut down the computer, locked the door and went to the house for hoodies. While he was there, he texted Peyton. I really miss you. I wish you could go to the football game tonight. There was no response, but then, why would there be? She hadn’t been in touch too much, and he hadn’t done too much to encourage her to reach out more.

  He went to Devon’s house where the kids were all eating their dinner. Devon was standing in the kitchen working her way through a hot dog. “Want one?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “What do you have going on this weekend? Like from tomorrow morning to Sunday afternoon?”

  She shrugged. “Same old stuff. House, shopping, kids, et cetera.”