The Beach House (15 page)

“Hi, Jimmy Mack.”

He ignored her.

“I’m Molly. We met yesterday? I thought you might like some breakfast.” She set the cup of coffee and wrapped food on the seat between them. “It’s a burrito and coffee. Oh.” She reached into her sweatshirt pocket and pulled out small packets.“Here’s cream, sugar, and hot sauce, if you like.”

Still no response from him.

“I talked to my kids this morning. Man, are they going to appreciate me when I get home! Scotty, my husband, gave them chores because yesterday’s breakfast was such a disaster. Eli—he’s eleven—was to get the cereal boxes out of the cupboard. Betsy was to set the table. Hannah was to help her daddy butter the toast. Then Abner—that’s what I call Abigail—was to stack and rinse the bowls. They all complained like it was a major ordeal. Scotty told them if they didn’t help, they would be tardy for school.
Again
.” She paused. “I should have let them help a long time ago. Taking on a little responsibility won’t kill them.”

“Kids need responsibility.” The guttural voice was nearly indecipherable.

“I think so too. Do you have kids?”

No response.

Like before, when she asked a direct question, he clammed up. She changed the subject. “My friend over there is getting antsy. We’re going to visit her office today. I think it’s in some fancy neighborhood. She’s a doctor. You know, if you were pregnant, she could take care of you.”

The corner of his mouth moved, so slightly she wondered if she imagined it.

Molly slid the food nearer him and stood. “I’ll see you later.”

Across the boardwalk, Jo shook her head, an amused expression on her face, and mouthed the word, “Why?”

Molly weaved her way between runners and walkers and closed in on her.“Hey, maybe he’s an angel.”

A small man on a small bicycle with tall handlebars pulled alongside Molly. “Jimmy Mack ain’t no angel.” He grinned.

She saw gaps where teeth should have been, his ragged clothing, and dirt smudges on his face. “How do you know he’s not?” she challenged him.

“He’s done gone too far the other way. ‘Jimmy, Jimmy, oh, Jimmy Mack, when are you coming back?’” Singing loudly off-key, the man veered the bike between her and Jo and pedaled away.

Jo looked at her. “Old song.”

“Martha and the Vandellas.”

“Miss Trivia Queen.”

They resumed their trek back toward the beach house.

Jo brushed her shoulder against Molly’s in a playful gesture. “I know why you do it. It’s why you carried me off to AA when I couldn’t stand on my own two feet. It’s why you’re going do your best to drag me out of this corner I’m trapped in. You’re really Saint Jude reincarnated.”

“I am not the saint of hopeless causes, Jo.”

“Then you’re Saint Molly, saint of the Molly Effect.”

She eyed her friend. The phrase from their college days had always been uttered with disdain and a grimace.

Jo smiled. “It’s okay. I think I’m ready for it. After all, you got Andie the scaredy cat talking to the weird neighbor and swimming in the ocean.”

“All I did was pray for her.”

“Prayer. Molly Effect. Same thing. I rest my case.”

“You are not a hopeless cause. Neither is Jimmy Mack.”

“Well, I ain’t no angel and neither is he.”

Molly glanced over her shoulder at Jimmy Mack. The knapsack was still cradled in his arms, but he held the coffee cup in one hand and the burrito in the other. She imagined then not angel wings but nail holes.

No, her friend and the stranger were not angels. Just wounded souls like herself in need of a touch from the One who hung on a cross.

Jo stood in the center of her spacious private office while Molly, Andie, and Char oohed and aahed. It was a repeat of what they had done a short while ago at her house.

“Sugar, I am green with envy.” Char trailed her fingers along the edge of the cherry desk and sat in one of the two matching sea green armchairs.

Andie moved slowly around the room, examining abstract art and framed degrees. “Char,
I
am green with envy. I’m the one who needs an office. You can be green with envy over her house.”

Char laughed. “All right. It’s a deal. Ocean view. Granite countertops. Stainless steel appliances. Mmm. Where do I sign up?”

“Where do I sign up?” Andie grinned. “Ocean view. Soft classical music, not a speaker in sight. Lovely green plants cascading everywhere. Gentle pastel colors. I don’t need the desk. The leather loveseat will be nice, though.”

Molly plopped onto the referenced couch. “It’s very pretty in here, Jo. Professional and warm at the same time. Even the examining rooms. The reception area is downright gorgeous, and the magazines are current, not six months old. I imagine all that makes your patients feel secure.”

Jo joined her on the couch. “Well, they used to, anyway. I’m officially on a self-appointed sabbatical of undetermined length. I’ve spent months casting patients off to the other doctors in the group. Letting my little mommies go. Convincing two women in imminent need of hysterectomies that the male down the hall is quite capable.”

“That sounds like an agonizing process.”

“Not as much as delivering babies. My first one after the funeral—I, um, I nearly lost the mother. Misread all the clues.” She had called Alcoholics Anonymous that night. A counselor talked to her for nearly four hours while she bit her nails to nubbins.“Every delivery after that one was sheer terror. That’s what I meant when I said I’m losing my confidence in practicing medicine. I don’t trust myself anymore. That girl’s death undid me.”

Molly touched her arm.“A sabbatical is a perfect solution. You’ll get grounded again.”

“Oh, Jo!” Andie exclaimed and swung around from where she stood before a bulletin board. “I’m sorry. This is a different subject. Yes, of course you will get grounded again! But look at this!” She pointed to the board, a collection of baby photographs, some yellowed with age. “Did you deliver all these babies?”

Jo nodded. “The first dates back thirteen years.”

“Oh, Jo!” she exclaimed again and turned back to the board.

“It’s become a tradition.” She shrugged. “A couple of my first mothers gave me pictures. Remember how we plastered our dorm rooms with photos of the four of us? I always liked that. Even—” She bit her lip.

They waited, three pairs of brows raised in expectation.

A sensation of letting go washed over Jo. It was fast becoming familiar. Why hold back now?

She swallowed.“Even wasted, I would gaze at those goofy pictures. I have no clue why that one of us at age fifteen standing around a pot of foul, boiling whitefish in Door County, Wisconsin, gave me hope. But it did. Anyway, I continued the practice and began displaying those first baby pictures. Every expectant mother notices the board, of course, and most of them add to it.”

“Jo, honey,” Char said, “what a tribute to your life’s work. It is absolutely precious.”

“I don’t know if it’s a trib—”

Molly squeezed her forearm.“Yes, it is. Just accept the compliment and say thank you.”

She didn’t deserve the compliment, but the Molly Effect had its way.“Thank you. The pictures give me hope. They ground me. I didn’t understand that until recently. I just knew I liked them. You probably noticed how impersonal my home is?”

Molly did her head thing, an ambivalent shoulder to shoulder bob. “The photo from my wedding was on your bookcase.”

“Some interior decorator convinced me to stash it years ago along with others. I unearthed that one on my birthday.” She gave them an abject smile. “I almost got rid of these too.”

Andie hurried to her side, knelt, and grasped the forearm Molly wasn’t touching.“Oh, Jo!” she gushed again, sounding more and more like her empathetic grandmother minus the accent.“Promise me you won’t ever get rid of them. They are a testimonial to you, to your wonderful work. Just imagine! All the new lives you’ve brought into this world. You must get grounded again. What do you need, Jo? What exactly do you want?”

It came in a flash, as if a curtain had been thrown aside. No. She smiled. It was as if she’d darted around a corner. She didn’t know what caused it. The Molly Effect? The Grandmère Babette clone holding her arm? The nearness of long-lost, caring friends? It didn’t matter. She knew right then and there exactly what she wanted.

Her smile broadened into a grin. Her cheeks ached at the unaccustomed stretch. “I’ll show you right after I draw some blood from Molly’s arm.”

So much more than thirty minutes separated Jo’s exquisitely appointed Del Mar office from the Hector Navarro Clinic.

Jo sat with Andie, Char, and Molly in her car parked at the curb across the street from the facility. The low, flat-roofed, stucco building with peeling aqua paint and its surrounding neighborhood would not have appeared out of place in Tijuana. Spanish was spoken as frequently as English, evident in the signage on businesses not boarded shut. There was no ocean view from any of them, not that the Pacific lay within visibility. Last week a drive-by shooting occurred two blocks over. At the moment a gang of kids clothed in baggy black and draped in copious silver chains loitered at the corner. They were probably exactly as they appeared: a gang. Children carrying guns, protecting turf, dealing drugs.

Tapping her fingers on the steering wheel, Jo eyed the trash-strewn sidewalk and waited for her friends’ reactions. In the rearview mirror she caught Char’s from the backseat.

Clapping a hand to her breast, Char exclaimed, “Oh, my!
That’s
where you volunteer?”

“Jo,” Andie breathed her name as if in awe. “You are a ministering angel.”

She winced at praise she did not deserve.

From the front passenger seat Molly locked eyes with her. “Saint Josephine.”

“I haven’t done it for long, and I don’t come often. Once a month, Saturdays. I missed a couple times ago.”

Andie said,“But this is where you’d rather be, right? This is exactly what you want to do, serve in a poor neighborhood?”

Jo’s imagination carried her back to when she was a third-year premed student visiting Chicago one weekend. Except for Christmas and occasional special events—her sister’s baby shower, her brother’s high school graduation—she did not go there. Three hours away, Champaign-Urbana became home with a capital
H
the moment she set foot inside that first dorm room, a suite she shared with Molly, Andie, and Char. A brand-new sense of freedom fell about her like a silky mantle. She vowed never to remove it.

Her mother and father were both physicians, Christine a gynecologist and John a surgeon. Distant and unemotional, they raised their three children at arm’s length except when scrutinizing their performance. Years after the fact, Jo realized she went into medicine as a means of seeking their acceptance. By then she had fallen in love with her profession and had no regrets about her choice.

During college days when she visited them, they expected her to accompany them on hospital rounds. After all, she owed them the opportunity to review the wisdom of their investment in her education.

That particular Saturday in Chicago she met Ernesto Delgado, a resident serving his internship. Jo knew her parents’ prejudices and recognized their disdain of the Hispanic. That fact only enhanced Jo’s immediate infatuation. In some crooked fashion it fueled his attraction to her as well. What better way to retaliate for the slights of Dr. and Dr. Zambruski than to break their daughter’s heart?

In time Jo and Ernie confessed the idiocy of basing their relationship on how they felt about her parents. Love grew long distance. He was intelligent, tall, dark, handsome, and fluent in his parents’ native tongue. She graduated from Illinois and then followed him and his compassionate heart to Los Angeles. While he practiced medicine in a barrio, she attended UCLA, paying her own way.

She fell in love, too, with his work among the poor. Yet after becoming a doctor herself and joining a high-profile OB/GYN group in Beverly Hills, she got cold feet. His was not the life for her. The old battle with parental approval gained the upper hand. Eventually she left him and Los Angeles and replaced binge drinking with making and spending money. Her stockbroker and a real estate agent became her closest friends. When office space and malpractice costs skyrocketed, she didn’t bat an eye.