Designs on the Doctor

“Hold on! Where do you think you’re going?” he said.

“It’s you!” Ally accused.

“Lie back down,” he commanded, easing her to the floor again before he said, “Yes, we spoke on the phone last night.”

His tone wasn’t warm, but at least it wasn’t as impatient as it had been the previous evening.

Ally realized then that the hospital receptionist and the rest of her mother’s friends had gathered around, keeping some distance behind Jake. She hated that she’d made such a spectacle.

“How about a chair?” he said to the nurse. “I think all we have here is a stress-related fainting spell. She doesn’t need a bed, but since she wants up, let’s let her try to sit. And maybe she can have a little orange juice and a cookie or a cracker…”

With the excitement over, the receptionist returned to her post as the nurse left to do the doctor’s bidding. Only Jake Fox and Estelle’s friends remained.

Then Jake said to Bubby, “You all can go out and watch for Nina—you don’t want to keep her waiting. I’ll deal with this.”

“I could stay,” Bubby offered. “Nina could take everyone else.”

“And miss your card games at the center? No, go on. There’s nothing you can do. You know what’s happening with Estelle, and her daughter is here now. She’s going to be okay. I’ll get her back on her feet and she can take over.”

After assuring Ally that she would check in with her at dinnertime, Bubby and the contingent of elderly ladies filed out of the emergency room just as the nurse brought a wheelchair into the reception area.

“We can put her in her mother’s room,” Jake told the nurse. “I’ll take her there while you see if you can find the juice and crackers.”

“I don’t need a wheelchair,” Ally protested. Feeling more embarrassed by the minute, she sat up slowly this time so she could stay up.

“I’ve kept you from having to see an E.R. doctor, but I’m not going to let you on your feet until I’m sure you can stay there,” the doctor said flatly.

The nurse put the brake on the chair and left again.

“Let me do the work,” the doctor ordered Ally.

His left arm came around her from behind again, he grasped her nearest forearm with his right hand and brought her off the floor and into the chair in one smooth movement as if she weighed nothing.

For no reason she understood, Ally was very aware of the power and strength in that bracing arm and the warmth of his hand on her bare skin. Aware of it all and feeling for the first time as if she wasn’t in this alone somehow.

But then she was in the wheelchair and she came to her senses—this was the guy who had read her the riot act and created the stress that had buckled her knees in the first place. Not only was she alone in whatever was happening, but she and Jake were at odds over it, without her even knowing why.

He didn’t say anything as he released the brake on the wheelchair and pushed her through the doors that separated the reception area and waiting room from the actual emergency-treatment area.

He took her to one of the small examining rooms that surrounded a central space like satellites. None of the doctors or nurses talking, checking charts or at the computers in the center even looked up, and when they got to Estelle’s room it was empty.

“My mother isn’t here,” Ally said.

“She’s probably still in X-ray. I’ll check,” he said, leaving just as the nurse came in with orange juice and crackers.

Rather than argue, Ally accepted them, taking a few sips of the juice and eating a cracker. Then she tested the sturdiness of her own feet.

She was still a bit shaky, but she made it to the visitor’s chair without incident and the nurse wheeled the chair out of the small room.

The nurse met Jake coming back and Ally watched as the two stopped just outside the door to discuss something she couldn’t hear. It gave her the opportunity to study the man who had caused her such torment in the last several hours.

He was tall, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, and had long legs that were muscular enough to tease the fabric of the khaki slacks he was wearing with a maroon dress shirt and tie.

His hair was a dark espresso brown and he wore it longish and slightly unkempt. He had the facial bone structure of a Greek god—all angles and planes and sharp edges. His nose was hawkish, his lips were lush, and if Ally hadn’t disliked him so much from their phone call, she would have been blown away by how good-looking he was.

But appearance aside, he was still the jerk who had verbally skewered her last night and movie-star handsomeness didn’t change that.

One thing was for sure, though, he wasn’t her mother’s boyfriend or companion. He was close to Ally’s age—likely in his early thirties—and while it would have surprised her to know her seventy-nine-year-old mother was keeping company with anyone, she knew Estelle wouldn’t do anything as audacious as fool around with a younger man.

Which begged the question—why was he hanging out with a group of geriatrics? Maybe he was related to Bubby?

His conversation with the nurse ended just then and he came back into the room.

Propping a hip on one corner of the examining table, he leveled a charcoal-colored gaze on her and Ally tried not to appreciate the beauty of those thickly lashed eyes. Instead, in her most authoritative voice, she said, “Will you please just tell me what’s going on with my mother?”

He surprised her with a purely businesslike voice of his own. “I hold groups at the senior center—”

“Groups?”

“I’m a psychiatrist.”

“My mother went for therapy?”

“Not exactly. The groups deal with general issues of aging.”

“Ah.” But if he was a shrink, wasn’t that all the more reason that he should have handled things with more tact? Ally thought it was but she didn’t say it and he merely went on.

“I also walk every morning with the ladies, so I have pretty consistent contact with Estelle.” He paused, sighed slightly and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to get into this on the phone and have you think it wasn’t that big a problem that you’d have to rush to address. But I started noticing problems with your mother’s memory a few months ago. I suggested some supplements, some vitamins that I was hoping might help. But she can be stubborn—and she told me I was crazy, that her memory was as good as ever.”

“Only you didn’t think that was true?”

“I’m not the only one who’s been seeing the changes. Bubby—who I’ve known half my life—and the rest of Estelle’s friends have also seen them.”

So he wasn’t related to Bubby.

“More than memory changes?” Ally asked rather than get into his personal life.

Jake sighed again. “There’s been an all-round slip in her mental state. She gets disoriented, confused. Bubby has been with her twice now when your mother has forgotten the way back from the senior center. Two other friends found her at the mall unable to find her car in the lot—they had to have security drive them up and down the rows until her friends spotted Estelle’s car, then one of them drove her home. We’ve been waiting—and hoping—that you would notice something and step in…but that’s never happened.”

That last part had a tinge of the previous evening’s criticism in it. But since he was allowing her to get her side of the story in, she said, “My mother and I talk on the phone once a week—every Sunday except this last one. But the fact that she doesn’t remember what I’ve told her from one week to the next isn’t unusual. She’s never been interested enough in what I tell her to make any kind of mental note about it. I’ve always had to remind her again and again that I’m referring to something I told her. I haven’t noticed that being any different.”

“Do you ask how she is? Did she tell you about the mall fiasco? You haven’t seen or heard anything that seems out of the ordinary?”

Ally thought about it, but she honestly could not come up with a single instance in which Estelle had seemed like anything but herself.

“No, nothing,” she said, even though she knew this man was going to take it as a strike against her. “Every week I ask how she is and she says she’s fine—never anything else. When I try to question her about what she’s doing, if she’s getting out of the house, what might be going on with her friends or at the senior center, she will only say that she’s keeping busy, and she gets peeved if I press her for any kind of details, as if I’m prying. Then she cuts me off and that’s it for that week’s call.”

“Maybe she doesn’t think you’re interested.”