She had made the right decision for everyone involved, including the people of Skip Rock, who so badly needed a physician. Regardless, the die had been cast, and here she was in a place she never intended to be, married to a man she rarely saw. Yet she smiled just thinking about Tern. Perhaps that old saw “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” was correct. Maybe if they were regular old married folks, she wouldn’t still get butterflies every time he crossed her mind. Judging from the frequent complaints she heard from her female patients, a husband’s constant presence could be a wearying cross. “No woman needs a husband seven days a week,” one who was pregnant with her fifth had said.
She couldn’t imagine that being with Tern would ever grow old. The way she felt right now, if her husband were home, she’d not only put his dirty socks in the hamper without a murmur, she’d wash his smelly feet.
Hannah was resting when Lilly stopped to call on Armina. Earlier in the day she’d had a cot delivered, and the nurse had set it up right outside the open bedroom door.
“Hannah,” Lilly whispered, “are you asleep?”
“Oh!” She startled awake and sat up. “Sorry, Doctor.”
“No, no
—rest whenever you get the chance. That’s why I
sent the cot.” Lilly peered into the darkened bedroom. Light snoring filled the space around them. “Did you have to use the restraints at all?”
“No, she’s been quiet most all day. If she gets fractious, I talk her down.”
“Good. I won’t wake her. I’m very pleased we won’t need more laudanum yet.”
Lilly motioned for the nurse to follow her into the kitchen. She needed to fill Hannah in about the baby in case Armina said anything. “Don’t question her, though, Hannah,” Lilly said after she’d relayed the facts. “We need to let her remember on her own, else she could have a setback.”
“Anne must be in seventh heaven,” the nurse said. “That woman does love babies.”
“I very much appreciate both of you,” Lilly said.
“But what about you, Doc? Having us tied up puts quite a strain on you.”
“Thankfully, there are no admits in the ward right now. The day-shift staff can handle the front office unless there’s an emergency. I suppose I should think about hiring a secretary type to man the desk.”
The nurse pulled her robe tightly around her. “When it rains . . .”
Lilly nodded. “It seems so.”
“A secretary might help out lots in the long run.”
Thinking back over the day, Lilly silently agreed. Tomorrow she would take Mazy along to the clinic. She could man the waiting room and keep things orderly.
They both jumped at the sound of scratching at the kitchen door, then laughed to find Kip, come to see Lilly home. “I’ll be back at 3 a.m. to check on you,” Lilly said.
“We’ll be fine. You sleep. I’ll come fetch you if things go awry.”
At home, Lilly found Mazy sitting at the kitchen table, spreading peanut butter on a thick slice of light bread. “I tried to wait supper, Lilly, but my belly was growling. Want a sandwich? Mrs. Tippen sent this delicious bread.” She waved her arm toward the stove. “And those disgusting beans. I could dish you up a bowl.”
Mazy had spread a crocheted cloth on the scarred oak table. Fresh-picked daisies with centers like daubs of sunshine brightened the table. Mama had sent the table to Lilly so that she would have memories of home in her new house. Even though Tern preferred modern furnishings, Lilly welcomed it. She had but to close her eyes to see Mama ensconced there, reading her Bible or feeding a baby
—sometimes both at the same time.
She didn’t know how famished she was until she took the first bite. Surely simmered on the back of the stove all day, and fragrant with smokehouse bacon, the beans were just what the doctor ordered. “I didn’t know you don’t like pintos, Mazy.”
Mazy sliced the crusts from her bread with a butter knife. “Bean soup is so common. I’m trying to lighten my palate.”
Lilly nearly choked on her beans. “With peanut butter?”
“Well, there’s not much fine cuisine to be had here.”
“Mazy Pelfrey, don’t get above your raising.”
A tear slipped down Mazy’s porcelain cheek. “There you go, just like Mama again.”
“Honey,” Lilly said, reaching across the table to take her sister’s hand, “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“Oooh, Lilly, I’m so homesick. I thought Troublesome Creek was boring, but this place has it beat. There’s nothing to do here, and you’re gone all day.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But I have a plan. Would you like to go to the office with me tomorrow? I could use an assistant.”
“I don’t like nursey stuff. I might just as well pick daisies.”
“Not patient care, more like secretarial duties. You’d be good at that.”
“Do I have to know shorthand? Molly and I took it in tenth grade. She was good, but it made me squeasy.” She shuddered at the thought. “Ugh.”
Lilly quickly spooned up more beans to hide a smile.
Squeasy?
“No shorthand, but you could organize the office and say which patient is to be seen next, that sort of thing.”
“What would I wear?”
“I should think you could dress up. You’ll be a business person, after all.”
A smile as bright as the daisies lightened Mazy’s countenance. “Oh, this could be fun.” She pushed away from the table. “I’m going to pick out an outfit.”
Lilly went to the icebox and poured a tall glass of buttermilk, then foraged in the breadbox for a wedge of corn bread. Back in her chair, she crumbled the bread into the milk and
ate it with a long-handled spoon. Her little one needed nourishment.
Mazy’s outburst made her wistful. She wanted so much to share her news with her mother face-to-face, not with a few pages of stationery sealed in an envelope. Mama would be so happy, and her stepdaddy, John
—why, he’d bust his buttons. Lilly pushed back the edge of the crocheted cloth and caressed the surface of the table in a familiar way. The tips of her fingers read each dent and ding as if it were braille. Here was a smooth triangle shape from when she’d heated her playhouse iron on the stovetop, then dropped it because it was too hot. And here the crisscross marks from chopping twigs to make a robin’s nest for an abandoned baby bird.
As a girl, she was always bringing in some creature in distress
—a grinning possum with a broken leg, a turtle with a cracked shell, a blacksnake missing an inch of tail. Even when she brought home the only survivor from a litter of albino skunks, so tiny its eyes were fused, her mother didn’t fuss but patiently taught her how to feed it with an eyedropper. It was about the time of the skunk that Daddy John had cleared a space in the washhouse for Lilly’s growing obsession.
She circled a pockmark with her index finger
—such warm memories. Her childhood had been nearly perfect. Could she make it so for her own children? With a father so often gone and an untraditional mother, would her baby have such a strong sense of family?
Upending her glass, Lilly drank the last dregs of mushy bread. For the moment, all she could promise was sturdy bones.
Anne’s square one-room house
was easy to find when Lilly went calling the next morning. The Beckers lived on a few rocky acres just past the Coopers’ house. Chickens flocked around her feet, pecking at her shoes as she walked across the yard. From under a shade tree, a short-haired red dog barely raised his head in interest. A fat sow rolled in a mud bath and grunted contentedly from the area underneath the raised porch. Lilly wondered if the chickens had cause for alarm. Daddy John always said if a hog caught a chicken, it would eat it, and once a hog had the taste for blood, it would kill anything, including humans, given a chance.
Anne welcomed Lilly with a big smile before laying the
baby on the bed for an exam. “I’m calling her Glory,” she said. “A baby’s got to have a name.”
Lilly listened intently as she auscultated the tiny chest. Anne’s own daughter, Amy, pulled herself up on the edge of the bed and played with the baby’s toes.
“She’s so good with her,” Anne said when Lilly finished, “and not one bit jealous.”
“How are the feeds?”
“La, she eats all the time.” Anne laughed. “My breadbasket is overflowing
—just like when Amy was first born. You know how it is before you get their take-out regulated with your put-out. I wake up soaked in milk.”
Lilly took the baby in her arms. “You’re so good to do this, Anne.”
“She’s a sweet little mite and hardly any trouble.” Anne gently scratched the infant’s scalp with her fingernails. Glory stretched and gave a goofy grin just like a normal baby would do under such stimulation.
Using a tongue depressor, Lilly examined the inside of the baby’s mouth as she had done the other night. “I’ve seen worse clefts,” she said.
“Is it a thing that can be fixed?” Anne asked with the air of a worried mother.
A weary sadness filled Lilly’s heart. It was the hardest part of being a doctor
—answering such a question with truth couched in hope. It didn’t take a woman long to bond with a baby
—hers or someone else’s. Anne’s demeanor was proof of that. Unlike a cleft lip, which could have been repaired in
infancy, a palate repair could not be done until the baby was several months old. It was a difficult surgery requiring great care afterward
—the baby could not be allowed to speak and must be fed with a spoon for a long duration. Even then the results were rarely favorable.
It wasn’t the cleft that might snuff out this little life, however. It was the ominous murmur she’d just heard through the bell of her stethoscope that gave Lilly pause. The third strike she’d hoped not to find
—a weakened, ineffective heart.
Lilly laid the baby back on the bed and sat down beside her. When she stroked the baby’s palm, the tiny hand curled around her finger. No, it didn’t take long for a woman to bond with a baby.
Lilly lifted Amy onto her lap and laid her cheek against the top of the little girl’s head. Amy’s skin smelled fresh and pure as Ivory soap. She wiggled around in Lilly’s arms until they were face-to-face
—so much energy in such a small package.
“She’ll be okay. Won’t she?” Anne asked again.
Lilly hedged. She hesitated to spread doom and gloom until she had to. “There is a murmur, but often murmurs go away. Continue what you’re doing, Anne. We’ll reassess the time for a surgical repair of the cleft when she’s several months old. In the meantime, perhaps her mother will show up.”
“Have you heard anything?”
“Not a word,” Lilly said.
“Armina’s not talking yet?”
“I saw her last evening. She was calm but still very confused.”
“My, my, the things that can happen to a body.”
“Indeed,” Lilly said, handing Amy to her mother. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
On the way to the office from Anne’s, Lilly widely skirted the Cooper place. A
Quarantine
sign was tacked to the wall between the window and the front door. Although measles was a disease most commonly contracted in childhood, persons well along in years sometimes came down with it. She wasn’t taking a chance unless she had to.
Two little children pressed up against the windowpane, waving enthusiastically to her as she walked by.
When Mrs. Cooper brought her brood into the office, only one had broken out. The mother had been in a panic. She was sure little Johnny’s rash meant scarlet fever. He’d had a high temperature followed by chills and languor for three days before a dusky-red rash erupted on his forehead and gradually spread all over his body. He also had weepy eyes and a runny nose. Lilly had been secretly appalled to think Mrs. Cooper would bring the boy into the office if she suspected a contagious disease, especially one as dangerous as scarlet fever. It would have been much safer for the community at large if she had requested a house call.
Johnny’s mother had been relieved when Lilly taught her how to tell the difference between the two diseases. In measles the spots were not as deeply colored and were differently shaped, grouped in crescents, and rougher to the touch. In scarlet fever the spots appeared on the second day
of illness, in measles on the third or fourth, and the irritation of the nose, sneezing, and discharge that were prominent symptoms of measles did not occur in scarlet fever.
Thankfully, Mrs. Cooper’s children were otherwise healthy. Lilly didn’t expect there would be complications. She’d provided a care plan for the mother to follow: spare diet, including baked apples to keep the bowels gently open, plenty of diluted drinks, sponge baths with tepid vinegar and water to cool the skin and relieve the itching, and a darkened room to soothe the eyes.
Mrs. Cooper appeared in the window behind her children. Soon the little ones were throwing kisses Lilly’s way and Mrs. Cooper mouthed,
“Thank you.”
Poor dear,
Lilly thought, waving back.
She’s in for a long haul.
It was not uncommon when there were several children in a family for the cases to succeed each other in fortnightly intervals. She suspected Mr. Cooper had moved out of the house for the duration. A man couldn’t afford to be caught up in quarantine. Someone had to make a living.
I should have sent her home with a bottle of Lydia Pinkham’s. She might need a bit of uplifting tonic to keep from pulling her hair out.
Lilly slipped in the back door to her office. The clinic was an L-shaped building. The short arm held the waiting room and her office/exam room, which backed up to a wide hallway that led to the small hospital and the surgery. She’d learned never to go in through the front room, where patients would
be waiting. Long minutes seated on hard wooden benches
—not to mention whatever ailment had brought them there
—tended to make folks impatient. If she went through the front room, someone was sure to demand her attention even if they were out of turn.
She seated herself behind the desk and pulled the string that would ring a bell at the nurse’s station to signal that she was ready for the first case of the day.
“The doctor will see you now,” Mazy said as she escorted old Mrs. Hill to the chair facing Lilly’s desk.
Lilly caught her sister’s eye, and Mazy gave her a thumbs-up. Dressed in a coffee-colored linen blouse and coordinating glen-plaid skirt, she was cute as a bug.
“Everything going okay out there?” Lilly asked.
Mazy’s hand strayed to plump her hair, but she jerked it back as if she’d been caught admiring herself in a mirror. “Yes, thank you, Doctor. Nurse says I’m a fast learner.”
“It’s not so well with me,” Mrs. Hill said with a huff. “I’ve been waiting since eight.”
Behind the patient’s back, Mazy rolled her eyes. Lilly wished she could roll hers. The office didn’t even open until nine. There was not a single solitary thing wrong with Mrs. Hill. But she showed up every Wednesday morning like clockwork
—always the first patient of the day.
“What seems to be the problem, Mrs. Hill?”
And so the day progressed. By lunchtime, Lilly had seen a slew of patients, and now a dozen metal-backed charts were stacked at her elbow. Most doctors charted as they went, but
Lilly kept notes that she later transferred. She liked her logs and graphs to be neat and precise and always in navy-blue ink. Thankfully, Wednesdays were half days.
“Whew,” Mazy said as she plopped into the empty chair. “You never told me it would be so busy.”
Lilly leaned back in her chair, taking a minute for her sister. “What do you think? Did you enjoy your morning?”
“I did. This was almost fun
—except for the sick people. All that sneezing and snorting. I didn’t like that so much. You know the best part?”
“No, what was the best part?”
Mazy straightened her shoulders. “For once in my life I got to tell people what to do.”
“The first time ever? Surely not,” Lilly teased.
“Oh, Lilly, you don’t know what it’s like to be the second-in-line twin. Molly was born superior.”
“Well, Nurse said you did very well. I hope you’ll take the job.”
“Do I get paid?”
Lilly opened a chart. “Yes, I think a stipend is in order.”
“I’d rather have money,” Mazy said, her face as guileless as a two-year-old’s. She jumped up and went into the washroom, leaving the door open. “I’ll bet you didn’t know there’s a beauty parlor here in Skip Rock,” she shouted as water splashed into the basin of the sink. “When I get paid, I’m going to get an appointment.” Drying her hands, she leaned around the doorframe. “Getting this mess of hair straightened will be money well spent.”
Lilly uncapped her fountain pen, but she didn’t say a word. There were some things a girl had to learn on her own.
Mazy smoothed lotion on her hands, releasing the scent of almonds and cherries into the room. “This smells just like Mama.”
Lilly looked up from the line she’d just penned. “I think that every time I twist the top off the bottle.”
Caught in a beam of sunlight streaming in through the window, Mazy’s golden curls framed her face like a halo. “Do you have any other jobs for me?”
A fissure of disquiet fractured Lilly’s concentration. Her sister was so lovely in her innocence
—still so unmarred by the vicissitudes of life. Sometimes Lilly wanted to put her in a box and store her on the top shelf of a closet like a fine piece of china too precious for everyday use.
“Would you like to get us some lunch from the diner? Their chicken salad is really good.”
Mazy’s eyes lit up. “Oooh, yes, how fun. Mama would never pay for lunch. Do you want an iced tea? And oh, they have that machine that makes potato chips while you watch. I want some of those. We could share.”
“Sounds good,” Lilly said, fishing a bill from her wallet. “And, Mazy, stop by the sheriff’s office on your way. It’s two doors up from the diner. Tell Sheriff Clay I need to speak to him.”
“The sheriff’s office? Really? Are we in the midst of a crime spree?”
“Hardly. Now just ring the bell and wait until he comes to the door. Don’t go inside. Understand?”
“Well, yes, but why?”
“It’s an unbecoming place for a young lady. Sheriff Clay won’t mind taking a quick message.”
“All right.” Mazy patted her hair. “Be right back.”
“This cold sweet tea is so good, Mazy,” Lilly said after a long sip through a soda straw. “Don’t forget to rinse the thermos.”
“Mmm, okay.” Mazy wiped a bit of mayonnaise from the corner of her mouth.
“Did you see Sheriff Clay?”
Mazy laid her half sandwich on the linen napkin she had spread on the desk. “I did, Sister.”
“And?”
“He’s dreamy, just dreamy.”
“Forevermore, Mazy, you’ve seen Chanis in church every Lord’s Day since the first of summer. Why, you’re even in the same Sunday school class.”
“But he looked so different today. On Sundays he’s just a regular fellow.”
“Did you tell him I needed to see him or did you stand on the sidewalk blinded by the light?”
“I told him, and I’m not leaving this office until he comes by.”
“It’s the uniform.”
“And the star on his chest.” Mazy fanned her face. “Did you see stars when you first met Tern?”
“Well, not literally,” Lilly laughed. “I was only eleven. I was more interested in the beagle dog he had with him than I was in Tern.”
“But eventually you saw stars, right?”
Lilly twisted the gold band on her left ring finger. Just mentioning Tern spread warmth from her toes to the top of her head. “Yes, indeed I did. But if you want my advice, don’t let the stars sway you.”
Mazy shook her head, making her honey-colored curls jounce like bedsprings. “I’m not marrying him, Lilly. I just want to look at him.” Her eyes widened and she clapped her hand over her mouth. “Speaking of the devil,” she whispered.
Chanis Clay stood just beyond the partially open door. The screen squeaked when Lilly motioned him in.
“Ma’am,” he said, removing his hat and tucking it under his arm. “You needed to see me?”
He stood by her desk at full attention as if he were a soldier in a dress parade. The crease in his khaki pants was so sharp it was a wonder he didn’t cut himself pulling them on. His calf-high boots were polished to a high shine; the dark-brown leather matched his gun belt and the holster on his right hip. His dark, brilliantined hair was swept back from his brow and parted in the middle. The only thing marring his perfection was a small shaving nick on his chin.
“Yes, thank you, Sheriff. Mazy, perhaps you’d like to finish your lunch on the front porch?”
Mazy wrapped what was left of her sandwich in her napkin and stood. With two fingers she snagged the potato chip
bag and tucked it under her chin so that she would have a hand to carry her sweet tea.
“Let me help,” Sheriff Clay said. Reaching to take the chips, his hand brushed Mazy’s cheek.
Mazy’s face pinked like apple blossoms. Her sandwich dropped, still wrapped, to the desktop. “I’m so clumsy,” she said.
Somehow, the sheriff wound up with Mazy’s sandwich and her chips, while Mazy carried her drink. Lilly heard the front door open and close before Chanis Clay backed into her office. He stood staring down the hallway for several seconds before he turned around.