Family Practice

* * *

“SORRY ABOUT THAT, Doc.”

Callie shifted her attention to the man in the doorway, a short, ruddy-faced, stocky guy with a buzz cut not doing anything to hide his receding hairline, and laughing blue eyes. He was wearing a faded red T-shirt emblazoned with U*S*M*C in equally faded gold letters, and shorts that exposed the prosthesis that replaced his left leg below the knee. His leather tool belt hung low on his hips, as if he were an old-time gunslinger. Rudy Koslowski. She remembered him from high school, even though he’d been a couple of years ahead of her. He’d joined the Marines immediately after graduation and lost his leg in a suicide-bomb attack in Afghanistan.

“Hi, Rudy,” she said, swallowing a sharp comment about the inadequacy of his warning. Rudy had always been a gossip even as a kid. She doubted he’d changed much over the years, and the last thing she wanted was to be reported to all and sundry as a bitch her first day on the job. “Quite a welcome home you arranged for me.”

“We aim to please. You still got the moves, Doc,” he said next.

“I beg your pardon?” But Rudy wasn’t looking at her; he was grinning at the man beside her.

“Oops.” Rudy chuckled, his expression as mischievous as Callie remembered from high school. “Guess we’re going to have to figure out another nickname for you, Corpsman. Can’t have two Docs in the place, can we?” He paused as if waiting for his barb to strike home.

Rudy was smiling, but Zach wasn’t. “Stow it, Rudy. She outranks us.”

“Sure thing.” Rudy raised both hands, signaling surrender, but his grin grew a little wider as he stared pointedly at their joined hands. “Whatever you say.” Belatedly Callie tugged herself free of Zach’s grasp. Why hadn’t she noticed Zach was still holding her hand before Rudy did? Maybe because she had enjoyed the feel of Zach’s long, strong fingers wrapped around her wrist. He had big hands, but his hold on her had been gentle. He would have no trouble setting a bone or reducing a dislocation with those hands and that strength, even in a combat situation. Experience she certainly didn’t have.

“Zach’s patients may call him whatever they and he are comfortable with,” she said, appalled at how condescending the remark sounded. She hadn’t meant it that way. She avoided speaking to colleagues in that manner, although she’d been talked down to plenty of times herself. Medicine, for the most part, was still a man’s world.

“Sure thing, Dr. Layman,” Rudy said. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

“What can I do to help?” she asked, hoping to make some kind of amends. This was not how she’d wanted to start her relationship with Zach Gibson, especially not with a witness as talkative as Rudy.

“Nothing, ma’am.”

She wished he wouldn’t call her that, but she could hardly ask him to call her Callie so soon, and insisting on being addressed as Dr. Layman would only add insult to injury at this point. “I want to help,” she said. “It’s my practice now,” she couldn’t stop herself from adding.

Zach’s face hardened momentarily. “You don’t know where a bloody thing is yet, or where it goes.” His tone softened, probably when he remembered he was talking to his boss. “You’re soaking wet and covered with fiberglass. Go on over to the White Pine and get changed. Besides, Leola and Bonnie are on their way to lend a hand.” The two women, both of whom Callie knew from her childhood, were the clinic’s nurses and receptionist/bookkeepers, both essential to the efficient functioning of the practice. “Everything’s under control here, ma’am.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” she snapped before she could censure her words.

“Yes, ma’am.” A corner of his mouth ticked up in what might have been a grin, but it was so fleeting Callie couldn’t be sure. “Go, Dr. Layman,” he said, the words just shy of being an outright command. “Let your dad and your new stepmother know you’re in town. Get yourself settled in and we’ll have this place ready for business on Monday morning.”

So this was the way he wanted things to go. Where he continued to call the shots and she had no say in the decisions.

Zach Gibson didn’t want her here; that was easy enough to figure out. The problem was...he was right. She would be more of a hindrance than a help to these people, who were used to working together as a team. She was the outsider. And the one thing she could never let any of them guess, especially her new PA, was that she was afraid she would never fit in.

CHAPTER TWO

THERE WAS NO PARKING space in front of the White Pine Bar and Grill, though Callie would have been surprised to find one on a Saturday evening in midsummer. She drove on by, turned left at the corner onto Perch Street, climbed the low hill, turned left again and angled her Jeep into the narrow gravel alleyway that ran behind the building. Her stepmother’s minivan was parked in the spot next to her dad’s SUV, but there was just enough space alongside the storage shed to park her car, if she didn’t ever need to open the passenger-side door.

She wiggled out of the Jeep and brushed at the front of her slacks. The fiberglass had made her itchy, not to put too fine a point on it. She wanted a hot shower and a change of clothes. She tugged her overnight bag out of the car and headed toward the kitchen entrance. There was an outside stairway leading to the family quarters on the second floor but she didn’t have a key to the door at the top, so the back stairs through the kitchen was her only option. She just hoped the White Pine’s longtime head cook, Margaret McElroy—Mac to everyone who knew her—would be too busy to question Callie on her unexpected arrival and bedraggled appearance.

She was in luck. As Callie entered, Mac, pushing sixty, wiry-haired, and as short and round as a fireplug, was haranguing her staff of college students and long-suffering grill cooks like the army drill sergeant she used to be. The high, screened windows, although open to the cooling evening breeze, did little to dispel the heat and humidity in the too-small room. The dishwasher was rumbling away, fire flared in the grill, and the smell of seared beef and hot grease caused Callie’s stomach to rumble. She hadn’t eaten since she left Ann Arbor and she suddenly realized just how hungry she was. The White Pine served great steaks, but what the restaurant was really famous for was the all-you-could-eat perch and bluegill dinners.

She’d return to the kitchen for some of each as soon as she was clean and dry. She grabbed her duffel, holding it to her chest, and hurried up the steep, narrow stairs. In the days when the building was a hotel, the stairs would have been used by the maids to carry hot water to the patrons in the rooms above. Nowadays it led to a door that opened into the family kitchen she and her dad had seldom used. She hesitated for a moment before the closed door. Should she knock? After all, it really wasn’t her home anymore. It was her father’s—and Ginger’s. She was only a guest. She settled on a quick, light tap, the kind of combined warning and greeting you’d give anyone before you opened a closed door in a house. No response. She opened the door. The kitchen was empty. The light was on, since it was now almost nine and the windows faced away from the lake into the lower branches of the pines and maples on the hillside. Ginger hadn’t gotten around to changing much in the small, functional room beyond painting the old pine cabinets a creamy white and adding a colorful valance above the utilitarian white blinds on the windows. Although the changes were minimal, Callie had to admit the room was a lot more inviting than it had been in the past.

“Hello, anybody home?” Callie called out. She didn’t really expect her dad or her stepmother to be here. They would be downstairs, her stepmother overseeing the dining-room operation and her dad behind the bar, where he still helped out during busy weekend evenings. But her stepsiblings might be hanging around. “Brandon? Becca?”

Silence. Maybe the twins were busing tables. She’d been younger than they were when she’d started busing, under the less than enthusiastic supervision of her mother. Free-spirited and fun-loving, Karen Layman hadn’t wanted to work in the grill when her in-laws retired to Arizona, but business hadn’t been good enough to warrant the expense of another full-time employee. So Callie’s mother had reluctantly filled the role of manager until the long hours, tight money and long, cold winters she hated had drained all the joy from her life and her marriage.

At least, that was what she’d told Callie when she’d taken off to rethink her priorities three weeks after Callie’s sixteenth birthday. From then on it had been just Callie and her dad...at least until a little over a year ago when Ginger Markwood had come into the White Pine inquiring about a job. She’d found not only employment but a place in J.R.’s heart. Now she was his wife, and her two children—three, soon—called Callie’s old home their own. The realization was more disturbing than she cared to admit.

“Hey, kids? Anyone here?” Callie called out again, moving from the kitchen into the big, high-ceilinged great room that had once been a dormitory for male guests. A huge river-rock fireplace dominated the wall to her left, twin to the one in the dining room that helped make it so inviting. The three double-hung windows covered in long, sheer panels of voile that were currently moving in the breeze faced Lake Street and also had a view of the lake, as did the window in her bedroom. What had once been six smaller private rooms bisected by a hallway leading off the wall opposite the fireplace had now become a master suite and small bathroom on the hill side and three bedrooms along the lake side. Her old room, the first on the left, was above the foyer on the main floor, the others above the dining room. When she was little, Callie had often lain in bed and listened to the muffled sounds of laughter and low conversations and the chiming of silverware against the edge of a china plate downstairs.

The living area with its worn, overstuffed leather furniture—she remembered what a production it had been to get it up the stairs—was empty, the TV turned off. She had the place to herself. The bar was directly below her but the ceiling had been soundproofed years before, so unless there was a live band playing on the occasional Saturday night, the room was as quiet as any other home’s main living area.

She hurried into the hallway toward the bathroom. The itching was getting worse. She didn’t carry a black doctor’s bag in this day and age but she did have a very well-equipped first-aid kit in the Jeep and she’d transferred some cortisone-based skin cream to her duffel before she came upstairs.

A nice hot shower, clean hair, dry clothes, and relief from the itching on her feet and calves, and she’d be ready to face her new family. She opened the door of her bedroom and swung the heavy walnut panel inward. But it wasn’t her bedroom anymore. Gone were the pale pink rose-strewn sheers and matching comforter her mother had helped her pick out the year before she left. The walls were newly painted a cloudy gray, and the drapes at the windows were heavy and pleated and almost black, casting the room into shadows now that the sun had set. Her brass bed had been replaced by a futon with a blood-red throw scattered with half a dozen pillows in jewel tones. The walls were plastered with posters of dragons and gryphons, elves and sorceresses, and hard-muscled, broad-shouldered mystical warriors in armor and chain mail that oddly enough reminded Callie just a tiny bit of Zach Gibson as he’d been earlier, legs spread wide, wielding his shop vac instead of a magical sword.

“Hey, what are you doing in my bedroom without permission?” a voice demanded. Callie gave a little yelp of surprise. Her new stepsister had come up behind Callie without her noticing and was standing in the hallway, hands on hips, her chin thrust out at a stubborn angle.

Becca was not a pretty child. She was tall and reed thin with long, straight strawberry blond hair, freckles, and a nose that was too big and too sharp for her face. Someday she would grow out of this awkward stage and become a striking, if not classically beautiful, woman. But today, dressed in a pine-green T-shirt with the White Pine logo on the left breast pocket and khakis—the uniform of the restaurant’s waitstaff—she was just plain homely. Her expression was as belligerent as her tone of voice.

“I’m sorry,” Callie said, shutting the door. “I...I didn’t realize you’d moved into my...into this room.”

“The new baby’s getting my room,” Becca said. She was still scowling and Callie wasn’t able to tell if she was happy with the move or not.

Her twin, Brandon, stuck his head around his sister’s shoulder and stared at Callie’s bedraggled appearance. “What happened to you? You’re all wet.”

He had the same strawberry blond hair and blue-gray eyes as his sister, but the resemblance ended there. He was three inches shorter and twenty pounds heavier than his sister, with a linebacker’s build and a round baby face that would be the bane of his existence well into his thirties, Callie guessed.

“Hi, Brandon.” She smiled, and it wasn’t quite as forced as when she’d greeted Becca. Brandon was a lot less hostile than his sister, even if she had disappointed him at Christmas by buying him a Detroit Tigers baseball jersey when his favorite team was the Cleveland Indians. Lesson learned, she’d promised herself. From now on she would consult Ginger before picking out gifts for her children. “I stopped at the clinic. There’s a broken water line in the ceiling. There’s water everywhere.”

“We heard,” Becca said. “Zach called us. Mom and your dad are going to the clinic to help as soon as the dinner rush is over.”

“You weren’t supposed to get here until tomorrow,” Brandon said. His blue-gray eyes were clouded with worry. “Everything was supposed to be cleaned up. You weren’t supposed to see the mess.”

“I wish I hadn’t,” Callie said frankly. Brandon seemed to be one of those kids who always felt as if everything that went wrong around them was their fault. Another reason she found it easier to relate to him. She remembered being the same way at his age. “It was an accident. We’ll get it all squared away.” She smiled again, although she wasn’t all that confident of her own words.

“Oh, dear, Callie? It is you.” The light, musical voice belonged to her stepmother. “Mac thought she saw you sneaking up the stairs. I sent the twins up to check, and when they didn’t return, I figured she was right.”

“I wasn’t sneaking,” Callie said, defending herself. “Hello, Ginger.” She spread her hands. “I wasn’t too keen on being seen this way.”

“Goodness.” Ginger took Brandon by the shoulders and moved him out of her way. Becca flattened herself against the wall, pointedly avoiding any contact with her mother’s protruding belly as Ginger moved forward to get a closer view of Callie. “What happened?” Her eyes narrowed as understanding dawned. “You’ve been to the clinic.”

“The door was open. There were cars in the parking lot when I drove by. It seemed unusual for this late on a Saturday. I thought I should check it out.”

“It’s lucky Zach stopped in when he did. It could have been a lot worse.”

“He seemed to have things pretty well under control when I left.” The way he’d dismissed her offer of help still bothered her slightly, but she didn’t say anything more. It was obvious her stepmother held the man in high regard—as did her father, she reminded herself. Professional courtesy and self-preservation warned her to keep her less flattering opinion of the PA to herself.

“Nothing’s going the way I planned it,” Ginger lamented. “Nothing’s ready for you.” She furrowed her brow, as if trying to figure out what to do next. She was a small woman, several inches shorter than Callie, with strawberry blonde hair the same shade as Becca’s but cut short and feathery, and with Brandon’s rounded face and snub nose. There were tiny laugh lines at the corners of her generous mouth and blue-gray eyes, another trait she shared with her children. She was pretty and petite and she laughed a lot. Maybe that was why her dad had fallen head over heels in love with her, even if she did come with a ready-made family in tow.

“Should we tell Dad she’s here?” Brandon asked.

A tiny needle prick of jealousy shot through Callie, an unsettling sensation. It was the first she’d heard either of Ginger’s children refer to her father that way. She hoped her involuntary reaction hadn’t been evident on her face or in her eyes. She was a grown woman. She could share her father’s love and affection. It was just going to take a little getting used to, that was all. “No, Dad’s probably busy behind the bar. I’d rather he not see me this way. Really, all I want now is to shower off this fiberglass and get into some dry clothes. I didn’t know where else to go. I’ll call around and find a motel room.” Callie was mortified. “It was thoughtless of me not to call you about the change of plans.”