Laugh (31 page)

He thought about when he first saw her, cataloged her muscles in her legs, laughed because she laughed, because her laugh was so surprised.

“You’re tired,” she said.

He was. He was what she told him he was.

He was what she believed him to be.

They got into his bed, even though it was early and they hadn’t eaten. It felt amazing. His body was starting to get stiff from his run, and stretching out with her against the cool sheets made him yawn and shiver with how good it felt. She pushed her ass against his hips, and he put his arms around her..

He’d remember this for the rest of his life.

He’d tell himself this memory if he ever believed he had lost everything to remind himself that he couldn’t. No loss could take Nina from his arms in this moment.

He’d lived his life to arrive here, no matter what else came after.

“How’d it go?”

PJ and Mike were leaning over his kitchen counter as he walked into his apartment, both of them with forks over the pink bakery box that Nina had left in his fridge two days ago.

“What the fuck are you guys doing here?”

“Support,” PJ said, his mouth full of pie.

“Fuckin’ solidarity,” said Mike, and PJ and Mike clinked forks.

“How is breaking into my apartment and eating my pie supportive?” Sam pulled off his tie and jacket, throwing them across the back of the sofa.

“Us bein’ here is supportive, pie eating is because we got bored and hungry.”

Sam pulled up a stool next to PJ and took his fork. He lifted out a piece of the sour cherry cream pie, his favorite of Rachel’s, and shoved half of it in his mouth.

“Not good, huh?”

“I don’t even know. I met with the investigator with the file of every single piece of paper I’d ever given the hospital credentialing office, as well as the Board of Medicine and the Board of Pharmacy. I sat there on my ass while the guy looked through everything for six hundred years. The hospital attorney did stuff on his phone. While this was going on I sweated through my suit.”

“Alright. So far that sounds like they’re not barring you from practice. Or sending you out of town on a rail.”

“Then the investigator started asking me questions, but none of them seemed to really mean anything. Sometimes the attorney would tell me not to answer, but it wasn’t like it is on TV. No one yelled. No one seemed to care. Then the investigator asked my attorney if I would be willing to sign a Consent Agreement, which basically means I say, Yeah, I made a filing error, I’m remorseful, when it’s ratified I will do some continuing education about rule of law for practice in my state, and when I finish it this will be the extent of what the board will seek in reprimand.”

“Okay,” said Mike, “I don’t know what the fuck any of that means, but all that sounds pretty reasonable.”

“I thought so, but then the attorney asked the investigator to demonstrate intent and any harm to the public, and requested a dismissal and a back date for some fucking reason, I don’t know. Then they talked about
the consent thing some more and spent an hour going back and forth on the language. At one point, the attorney spent fifteen minutes on the wording of a sentence that sounded the same all eight ways he suggested it.”

“So it sounds like this meeting was actually your punishment,” PJ said.

“No shit.”

“Then what?” Mike said.

“Then fucking nothing.” Sam ate another huge mouthful of pie, needing fortification.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, fucking nothing. I’m just sitting there, forever, while they talk about this agreement thing, not arguing or anything, just talking about it. At some point they call up to the credentialing office and ask a bunch of questions. Then the attorney stands up and says we’re done for the day, meanwhile, this whole time, Lacey is sending me ten thousand text messages.”

“So now what?”

“I wait until the attorney calls me. At the end of the day, it is a filing error. On my part and on the part of the hospital credentialing office. I’ve been so busy working, taking care of everything at the clinic and pulling all those shifts with the hospital, a routine filing date went by. For once, it wasn’t all me.”

“What did Lacey say?” PJ asked.

“Nothing yet. I haven’t gotten back to her because I assumed she’s been stalking the street for when she sees my car.”

Then they all looked at the door as someone knocked three times before turning the knob and walking in.

“What happened? I’ve texted you about ten thousand times.” Lacey hung her purse on the knob behind her. She was wearing scrubs so she must have been at the hospital during his meeting. Sam was shocked she hadn’t waited outside the conference room door.

“I waited outside the conference room door forever, trying to see if I could hear something, but that asshole Carla Forner made me move out of the hallway.”

“Jesus, Lace. Carla’s probably eighty years old. She’s a hospital institution.”

“No, the hospital’s an institution, Carla’s an asshole.”

“I like your hair,” PJ said, and took a bite of pie.

Everyone looked at PJ. “What?” he asked. “She got it cut.”

“Like half an inch. I got it trimmed.”

“I can tell, and it looks nice.”

Lacey ran her hands through her hair and kept an eye on PJ while she sat down next to Mike and took his fork. “DeeDee know you’re eating pie? She told me you got your cholesterol numbers back from your
physical.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, is there nowhere I can go in this neighborhood without getting nagged? I was at the diner this morning and Jackie wouldn’t serve me eggs.”

“Your numbers aren’t good, Mike.”

Sam looked at Mike, concerned. “What’s your total?”

“Seriously, cease and desist. You were just with an attorney, you know what that means.”

“Two hundred forty-four,” said Lacey, starting in on the pie.

“What the fuck, Mike? Your doc put you on statins?”

“Is nothing sacred? What happened to doctor-patient confidentiality?”

“I’m not your doctor,” Sam said.

“DeeDee told me, she’s really freaked. She reminded me your dad had his first heart attack when he was forty-five. That’s six years, Mike.”

“This is like dinner and a show,” said PJ.

“We could talk about my impending death, or we could talk about our boy’s legal troubles that are endangering your clinic and your livelihood.”

“Thanks for that, Mike. You’re a pal,” Sam said.

“What happened?” Lacey gave her fork to PJ to keep it away from Mike.

Sam told her.

“That’s it? Did you tell them the clinic’s credentialing is waiting for your license to get cleared up? That we have our first audit coming up? That if we miss the audit, we’ll have to wait another three months? I’m not sure we can work the lease another three months without the grant release before we start billing. I got the accountant to donate some pro bono hours to see, but …”

“I talked to the attorney about that stuff, just to get a timeline, yeah. I mean not exactly that stuff, but the stuff I know you’re worried about.”

“Okay. What did he say?” Lacey leaned forward, and Sam looked at her bright-eyed resolve.

There was a reason he had gone right to Lacey Radcliffe when he had the beginning of an idea to open a clinic in their neighborhood.

He could have gone to Mike, who was also master’s prepared, a hard worker, and even a better choice than Lacey at putting up with his bullshit.

Except, in this case, it wouldn’t work.

Mike was always going to care more about Sam than the clinic. Plus Mike was solid with what worked.

When Sam thought about this clinic, he had never thought about just doing “whatever worked,” he wanted to make the best clinic possible for the neighborhood.

He thought about the kind of clinic that Lacey Radcliffe would work in.

Sam had a lot of admiration for Lacey, but the truth was, Lace had always had a hard time. She was perfectionistic and idealistic and she noticed everything. As a kid, she was all eyeballs in a pointy-chinned face with a wrinkled brow. She always asked a million questions and was forever looking things up for answers.

She
needed
to know the answers. Needed to know them because they would save her, somehow. From what, no one was ever entirely sure.

Except that it probably wasn’t good, the thing Lacey was trying so hard to outthink.

Sam suspected PJ knew.

Sam suspected that whatever PJ knew, it was the reason he loved her and the reason Lacey called him
Paul.

Sam looked at PJ, and PJ looked at him, and Sam hoped to God that brother telepathy was some kind of real thing, because he needed it right now. He needed his brother to hear him, and hear him when he said,
Lacey has to believe in herself.

PJ grinned at Sam, and said, actually said out loud, “Message received.”

Which made Sam want to bear-hug PJ and tell him that he loved him, and he thought about this entire spring and summer when that hadn’t been remotely possible, all the times that was never remotely possible, and he wondered why. He wondered how he could love PJ so much and PJ not really know it the way he deserved.

PJ didn’t have a single problem with expressing his love, but every time he tried, Sam didn’t let him, didn’t let PJ in.

If he could possibly help it, that would never happen again.

“So the timeline’s not good” was how Sam started. He hated himself for everything he said after: even in the most expedient process, which meant Sam signing whatever the board wanted him to sign, he still had to wait until the board meeting next month, which fucked up the clinic with their first audit, which would have to be rescheduled. But the attorney probably wouldn’t want him to sign everything, for what were probably good reasons, and so that meant credentialing would be easier, but later. Much later.

The worst part of telling Lacey all of this was watching her face.

Sam wasn’t sure he was an entirely good person—one reason he’d always trusted Lacey was that she’d gotten herself knocked up in college and couldn’t resist good-looking guys no matter what came out of their mouths.

Made her more human around the edges, plus Nathan was a fucking great kid.

PJ—he loved her. Loved her at her most neurotic and perfectionistic and at her most human. All he saw when he saw Lacey was the woman he loved.

Sam had only just recently, much older, understood this kind of love. PJ’s love for Lacey wasn’t
conventional, but he had always been certain it was a pure love, the kind of love a Burnside falls into, and pure in the church way, besides.

Also, though Sam couldn’t be sure because he sucked at stuff like this, there had to be some reason PJ was still around, some reason Lacey suffered him, and all of her jokes and eye-rolling seemed like protesting a bit too much.

Paul.

Right now, Lacey looked devastated.

So right now, Lacey needed Paul.

“Here it is, Lace,” PJ said, “the clinic doesn’t need anyone but you.”

“Sam’s my physician partner. My collaborating partner, we have a Standard Care Arrangement.”

“We still can,” said Sam. “As soon as my stuff’s done. In the meantime, I did check, your SCA with the hospital will stand because we’ll be taking their low-income clients within our boundaries.”

“Our applications favor a physician partner for all the qualifiers.”

“They favor it,” said Sam, “but it’s not a requirement. Plus, we’re done with all those apps.”

“You’re the clinic, Lacey,” PJ said. “You’ve always been the clinic.
You’re
what makes people trust the clinic. People around here love Sam as a doctor, but they don’t think of it as Sam’s clinic, they think of it as yours. This has always been yours. The only reason people think it’s a real clinic and not some sign on a card table that says P
HYSICALS
5 C
ENTS
is because it’s yours.”

Lacey was looking at PJ, her cheeks red.

“True facts,” said Mike. “I wouldn’t take my dog there if you weren’t in charge. Sam coulda asked me, and he didn’t, because that’s exactly how smart he is. Not quite smart enough to hang on to his medical license, but smart enough to know to ask you to do this thing.”

“But what are you asking, Sam?”

Then the door knocked again, and Sarah came through, effortless on her forearm cane, and Daniel, the ex-priest guy behind her, for some unknown reason. Sarah came right up to the counter, and Daniel hung back by the door.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t know I’d be following Sarah into a gathering.”

“No worries, Father. Pull up a stool.” Mike slid down and indicated where Daniel should sit.

“You don’t need to use the honorific, Mike. I’m not a priest anymore.”

“And don’t Betty know it? But I figure it’s like how you always call even ex-presidents ‘Mr. President,’ it just shows respect for the office.”

Daniel laughed. “Sure. This really okay, Sam? I just came with Sarah because she needed a ride and said you might need someone to talk to, but it looks like you’ve already gathered a conference.”

“We were just talking to Lacey about how she should go solo on the southie clinic,” Mike said.

“Oh yeah? Lace, that’s great, you should. I’ve been saying that all summer, no offense, Sam.” Sarah elbowed him in the side with her tiny, pointy elbows.

“Is that what you’re asking, Sam? For me to take over?”

“Well, you have to, anyway, if we’re going to do this thing. But even before all this stuff with the board, I’d been thinking about it. It’s not just mistakes I’ve made, either. I realized that part of my fuckups wasn’t only my ADHD, it was that my heart isn’t in it. Not the clinic, but all the work you’re doing. The worst part is, I haven’t been letting you
love
it.”

Lacey was quiet.

“You do love it, Lace,” said PJ. “You love it. I’ve never seen you so happy. You keep complaining and saying you need Sam, but I haven’t seen you swamped, at all, ever. It’s like this big puzzle with all these parts and edges and ways it could fit together, and you move the pieces around and look at all the possibilities. This is it. It’s your verb, babe.”