clear you for camp, pending the x-ray. You’re not going to damage it if it’s a bone bruise. If it starts to hurt more, just stay off it for a while. Ice every day. And don’t jump out of trees.”
“But I like to climb trees.”
“Then try climbing down the tree after you’ve climbed up it.”
Katie gave her a grin and slid off the table.
“Not so fast,” Allison consulted Katie’s file. “You’re due for a tetanus shot.” Katie made a face. “I can’t sign the camp form without it.” Katie sighed. Allison administered the booster and took the leg x-ray. When they were done, she escorted Katie to the waiting room where Josh stood reading the bulletin board.
Allison had hardly seen him since Sharon’s death. Sharon had been their link and the link had been broken. The limited contact was probably merciful, she decided. Sharon would have been the topic of conversation. The wound was still too raw for both of them. The loss of a young woman, a dear friend, of her own age was real enough for her. She couldn’t imagine what it was like for Josh. Still, she found herself happy to see him. He looked stronger than the grief-ravaged husband he had been at the end and he positively lit up at the sight of his daughter.
“Katie looks fine,” she reassured Josh. “I gave her a tetanus booster and took a precautionary x-ray of her leg but I don’t expect to find a problem.” Allison made a point of looking directly at Josh and at his daughter, acknowledging the girl’s status as a full participant in the conversation about her own well-being.
“That’s good news,” Josh said. “How about the permission slip?”
Allison knew her own father—an unwavering stickler for doing things by the book—would never have signed the camp form without the results of Katie’s x-ray. But she had adopted a more flexible approach that started with: Do what’s best for the patient. “Sure,” she said. “It’ll save you a trip.” She signed the form and handed it to Katie. “If I see anything on the x-ray, I’ll let you know.”
When they were gone Allison removed her lab coat, collapsed into the black high-backed leather chair behind her desk, and slipped off her shoes. She was starting to unwind when Coretha Hall, her nurse assistant, entered and plopped an armload of files on her desk. Allison stared at them. “Tell me again why I wanted to be a doctor?” she sighed.
Coretha laughed. “Your father used to sit right there and say the same thing. He just hated the paperwork.”
Allison flipped her hair over the back of the desk chair. “What did you tell the old man?”
“I’d say, ‘Dr. Wright, you were young and naïve. You must not have known what you were getting into.’”
“I suppose I can’t use that excuse.”
“No,” Coretha agreed. “For as long as you dilly-dallied around, I’d say you can’t.”
Coretha was, Allison decided, equal parts compassion, humor and no-nonsense. Perfect for a nurse. In that way, she reminded Allison of her mother. It made sense since both women had served the same demanding man—her father—for much of their lives.
Coretha’s dark skin contrasted with her white cotton nurse’s uniform. Oversized bright red glasses hung from a cord around her neck. She lifted them to the end of her nose and looked at her watch. “Quitting time,” she announced.
“You go ahead.” Allison waved at the files on her desk representing the day’s cases. “I’ve got paperwork.” She grabbed the file of Ricky Scruggs. “People don’t understand piercing is surgery,” she said. “You can’t use equipment that hasn’t been sterilized.”
“That what caused his problem?”
“Odds are. He did it himself.”
Coretha shuddered. “You wouldn’t catch me doing that. Is that what happened to the woman with the earlobes?”
Allison replayed her mental tape until it got to the prior week and the small, mousy woman with scraggly hair, her earlobes hot with infection that spread in flaming spikes across her jaw and down her neck. She hadn’t thought of her when Scruggs showed up and she decided there was no reason she should have.
“The woman had her ears pierced years ago, not recently. Interesting coincidence but unrelated.” Allison opened Scruggs’s folder.
“C’mon,” Coretha implored. “Let’s lock up and get out of here. At least one night, you need to go home. If I’d known it was going to keep you here tonight, I’d have kept the paperwork on my desk. Anyway, it will still be there tomorrow.”
“Exactly.”
Coretha put down her purse. “You need a life, honey. Family. A husband. You can’t hit the snooze button on your biological clock forever.”
Allison made a face. At age thirty-seven, the issue was a sore spot. If anyone other than Coretha had brought it up . . .
“Just because you couldn’t make it work the first time . . .”
Allison returned to the file and focused on the first page. “See you tomorrow.”
Coretha stared at her a moment then gathered her purse and left.
A few minutes later, unable to concentrate, Allison picked up her keys, passed through the reception area with its tired collection of faded vinyl chairs, Formica coffee tables and tattered copies of Ladies’ Home Journal and Field & Stream, locked the beveled glass door with the sign that still read Winston Medical Clinic, Horace Wright, M.D. and headed for home. Hippocrates met her at the door, rubbing against her leg and purring. At least the cat was glad to see her.
She popped a low-cal frozen casserole into the microwave, ate a quick dinner and crawled into bed. She started to reach for the stack of medical journals at her bedside but reconsidered and snapped off the light. She reviewed the events of the day. She decided she would recheck the file of the woman with the earlobe infections. Seconds later, she was asleep.
Harry Dorn saluted, waved and strode off the ballroom stage of the Greenbrier Hotel with his audience in the middle of a standing ovation. Always leave them wanting more, he had learned early on.
As often as he had given the Liberty Agenda speech, it never failed to inspire almost everyone in the audience—including him. Tonight had been no exception. He’d been at the top of his game, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. He’d done a table count during the Pledge of Allegiance. There must have been six hundred people in the audience. And the introduction! “Ladies and Gentlemen, the next senator from West Virginia and the future president of the United States!” Way overdone, but still . . .
The applause continued as he slipped out a side door. Before the speech, he’d been tired, dying to get out of his monkey suit and out to his weekend retreat on the river at Possum Island. But the speech had energized him. He was on a roll, eager for the next item on the agenda.
He ducked into the men’s room and went immediately to the mirror. He arranged his remaining hair in the manner the consultant had suggested,
