The Best Medicine (23 page)

Her expression was despondent, as if she’d not only lost her puppy, but also discovered it had been eaten by werewolves.

She took a big breath and blew it out in a single puff. “So then Mike says. ‘I guess I have decided. I think we should break up.’”

She didn’t even try to hold the tears back then. It was Niagara Falls all down her face.

In all the months I’d been living in Bell Harbor, I’d never met Mike. He wasn’t remotely social, and I had the sneaking suspicion that Gabby was far better off without him, but telling her that probably wouldn’t make her feel better.

You’ve just wasted four years of your life. But at least the bum is gone now.

“I’m really sorry, sweetie. I wish I could fix this.” I moved closer and patted her back. Panzer must have heard the familiar sound. He wandered out from the bedroom to investigate who was horning in on his patting action.

Gabby hiccupped. “Oh, is that your dog?”

She held out her arms. He ambled into her embrace and she hugged him tight, crying all over his fur. He was probably better at comforting her than any trite phrase I might come up with, so I let them have their moment. Plus I didn’t want to breathe on her. I got up and walked into the kitchen to get her a glass of water, and me more ibuprofen. My body still ached, and I was starting to get the chills again.

The front door rattled, and then opened. Tyler’s eyes lit up when he spotted me upright.

“Hey, you look better than you did this morning. Here’s another box of tampons. They fell out in my car.” He walked in and set them on the counter, kissing me on the cheek as he passed.

Gabby lifted her face from Panzer’s fur and hiccupped again.

Tyler looked toward the noise, and red stained his cheeks as he saw her sitting on the sofa. “I didn’t realize you had company.”

Gabby’s red-rimmed eyes blinked. She gave him a lopsided smile and a wave. “Hi, Tyler. Remember me? Gabby Linton.”

He waved back. “I remember. Bell Harbor High. How are you?”

She sniffled and hiccupped. “F-f-fine.”

Tyler’s gaze slammed back to me. “OK, well. Good to see you. Evie, I’ll just take Panzer for a walk and be back in about half an hour. OK?”

He’d already dealt with me crying today. Apparently Gabby’s tears exceeded his quota. He grabbed the leash from the hook next to the front door where it hung.

“Panzer. Let’s go.”

Gabby lifted her arms and the dog trotted over to the door. They were gone faster than a couple of Olympic sprinters.

I looked over at Gabby. She stood up, wiped away a tear, and hiccupped. “Ships passing in the night, huh? That seemed pretty cozy.”

“He’s just helping me with the dog because I have the flu. Remember? I have the flu? You do not want to catch this.” I didn’t want her to think she should leave, except that I was desperate for her to leave. I couldn’t help her with Mike, not in my present condition. She needed to go find her sister or one of her eight hundred cousins.

She walked into the kitchen and picked up the box of tampons. “This is pretty personal, if you ask me.”

I gently took the box back. “Yes, it’s personal. So could you please keep this between us, Gabby? What’s going on with Tyler and me is private.”

She nodded and wiped away another errant tear. “Can I at least tell Delle?”

“No.”

She heaved a big sigh. “Well, I’m glad you have something nice going on. I have to go home to my lonely apartment. Do you have any D-cell batteries?”

Chapter 24

GABBY HAD GONE BY THE
time Tyler came back with the dog, and I’m not sure who was more relieved, me, him, or the exhausted Panzer.

“You’ve been gone quite a while,” I said as he hung up the leash.

Panzer walked into the bedroom. I heard him snuffle around until he settled into his Sherpa mattress with a happy, doggy sigh.

“We were in the mood for a long walk.” Tyler peeked surreptitiously at the sofa. “Is Gabby still here?”

“No, it’s just us. Thanks for buying me this soup. Do you want some?”

He came into the kitchen where I was heating it up in a pot.

“I can do that for you. Go sit down.” He pointed to the couch. I was tired enough not to argue.

“What was she so upset about?” he asked as he opened my cupboard and pulled out two bowls.

“Her boyfriend dumped her. Mike somebody.”

“Oh, yeah. Mike Peabody. Guy’s an asshole. She’s better off.”

“That’s kind of what I wanted to tell her, but it’s too soon.” I moved the pillows on the sofa and thought about lying down. Ten minutes of standing up in the kitchen had done me in.

Tyler brought the soup over to the coffee table and handed me a spoon. Then he brought me something blue with ice in it.

“What’s this?”

“Gatorade.”

How
adorável
was that? He was giving me electrolytes because I had puked. No one had taken care of me during an illness since I was a child. And even then, my parents had mostly told me to just suck it up. I smiled over at him as he sat down, a rush of warmth and affection cascading over me.

“What?” He looked around.

“I bet you are a really good EMT,” I said softly.

He blushed and adjusted a sofa pillow behind his back. “Because I carried the soup all the way from the kitchen to the table?”

I felt my eyes start to puddle again, and my voice warbled. “No, because you rushed over here as soon as I called, and you took out the dog, and you bought me all that food and feminine hygiene products, and then here you are again, bringing me soup.” My voice hitched, and I let a tear slip out, and Tyler burst out laughing.

He wrapped his arm around my shoulders and pulled me in for a hug. “Oh my God, Evelyn, this flu has made you a crazy person.”

I shook my head. “No, it hasn’t. I’m just being honest.” More tears slipped out. OK, maybe I was feeling a little crazy. Whatever had taken over my body was obviously messing with my composure too.

He patted my back. “OK. OK. If you say so. Now eat your soup.”

I obediently took a bite. “I really bet you are, though. How long have you been on the job?”

He looked upward, as if tabulating. “Almost three years, but I was the FNG for almost half that.”

“FNG?”

“Fucking new guy.” His half smile suggested being FNG wasn’t all that bad. “That’s your title until they hire somebody new. The FNG gets stuck with all the crap jobs no one else wants to do. You know, extra cleaning and stocking the rig and such. And you’re the target of every prank.”

He sounded like a pretty good sport about it, and that didn’t surprise me. “What kind of pranks?”

He pondered some more, apparently scrolling through memories. “The usual stuff. Rubber snake under your pillow in the call room, KY jelly on the Hail Mary bars in the back of the ambulance when you’re on practice rides, stuff like that. The driver gets points for every body part he can make you smack.”

“That’s not very nice.” Not nice at all, but it did sound funny.

“Well, when you’re pulling a double or triple shift, those kinds of things can really lighten the mood. I’ve been picking up a lot of those lately to earn some extra cash.”

Additional call shifts to earn extra money? Just like me. Only I took call so I could pay a decorator to load up my plush new house with plush new furniture, and Tyler was doing it so Scotty wouldn’t go to jail and his mother’s place wouldn’t go into foreclosure. I suddenly felt overly indulgent. I worked hard to have the things I had, but Tyler worked hard too. It didn’t seem fair. It made my eyes water again, and if I kept on crying, he was going to sedate me.

“What’s your craziest patient story?” I asked instead, hoping to elevate my own mood. Everyone in medicine has crazy patient stories. Boob-flashing Dody Baker was at the top of my list.

“So many to choose from,” he answered. “But let’s see. I guess the most recent is this one old guy who keeps calling us for the same issue. We keep telling him he’s fine, but every time we have to take him into the ED anyway.” He set his soup bowl down on the table and ran a hand through his hair.

“What’s his issue?”

“Beets.”

“Beets?”

“Yeah, apparently he keeps stealing beets from his neighbor’s garden and they turn his pee bright pink. He thinks he’s dying. But no, it’s just the beets. Last time we were there, the neighbor came running after him with a rake. Funniest thing ever, watching two eighty-year-old dudes trying to wrestle each other to the ground.”

He laughed at the memory, and I wondered if either of those old guys had noticed how debilitatingly attractive Tyler’s dimples were.

Probably not.

“Dr. Andrews said if we brought him into her ED again she’d hit him with a rake herself.”

I sat up a little straighter. “Dr. Andrews?” Suddenly I wondered if this Dr. Andrews had noticed the dimples.

“Yeah, over at Trinity Health. That’s where we usually go since our area is east of Bell Harbor. I don’t make it to your hospital very often. Unless I’m a patient, I guess.”

That explained why I’d never seen him in the department before. If I had, I’d have remembered. And so would most of the nurses.

“I didn’t realize you were over near Trinity. How are you managing that? Working all those hours for MedPro and then serving at Jasper’s? Aren’t you exhausted?”

He shrugged. “I guess I’m used to it.” He took the empty bowl from my hands and set it next to his. Then he leaned back and stretched his arm over the back of the sofa toward me. “Honestly, the hardest part isn’t being busy. I like that. But lately I find myself . . . wondering . . . what you’re up to. Where you are. Wishing we were in the same place.”

His voice had gone all warm and bedroomy. He must be catching my fever, because he couldn’t be gazing at me with such infatuation given how horrendous I looked. I was wearing gray sweats and an extra-large, extra-faded Northwestern T-shirt. But his expression said I was beautiful. Yes, he was definitely catching my delusional fever.

“I like you, Evie. A lot. That’s probably obvious, but in case there was any doubt, I thought you should know.” He didn’t seem to be teasing. Or febrile.

I reached out my hand, entwining my fingers with his. “I like you too. In case it isn’t obvious.”

He looked down for a second, just long enough for me to realize he was winding up for something big, then his eyes were back on me. Bright. Sincere.

“It’s not obvious,” he said.

“It isn’t? Do you think I fool around in lifeguard huts all the time?” I was trying to make a joke, but he didn’t go for it. His jaw set, twin lines creased between his furrowed brows.

“Look, I know you’re doing this computer dating thing. And I can’t really ask you not to because I know you’ve got this husband and kids thing on your mind. I also happen to know you went out with some other guy last night. Word travels. But Evie, I’m not big on sharing.”

“Sharing?” Suddenly this conversation had taken a turn toward Seriousville.

Tyler clutched my hand a little tighter. “I’m not the type to make promises I can’t keep, and I don’t know what’s in store for me in the next year or so, but the bottom line is, if you sleep with some other guy, I’m out of here.”

“He said that?” Gabby’s face lit up as if she held a winning lottery ticket. “How utterly romantic.”

“How is that romantic? He’s just marking his territory,” Hilary answered.

The two of them were in my office once again. I really needed to get a lock for that door, because as much as I enjoyed these daily dissections of my love life, we’d been discussing this latest milestone in my nonmarital status for almost half an hour, and it was nearly time for me to start seeing patients.

Gabby waved her sister’s words away with a flick of her fingers. “Not marking his territory. He’s saying she’s important to him. So what did you say back?”

“I said OK. And then I went to bed alone because I still had the flu.” It wasn’t quite as romantic as Gabby seemed to think, and yet . . . it was. Because he
wasn’t
just marking his territory. He
was
saying I was important to him. And I hadn’t been important to someone in a very long time.

“So that’s it then?” Hilary wiped lipstick off the lid of her coffee cup and didn’t look at me. “No more husband hunting? No more
I think I want a baby
? You’re just going to have playtime with Tyler and forget the rest? That’s kind of rash, don’t you think?”

This news was proving hard for Hilary, and I wasn’t entirely sure why.

“It’s not so much that I’m done husband hunting. I’m just postponing all the marriage and baby stuff for a while. I mean, I’ve waited this long, so what’s a few more months? Or even a year? I mean, who knows how long this thing with Tyler will last?”

She looked at me now, her eyes sad. “But what if it does last? Let’s say you guys are still together in five years. All that time, will you be longing for children? I know this is pure selfishness on my part, but I’d like your kids to play with my kids. And I don’t know about you, but forty and pregnant doesn’t sound that fun to me.”

“Forty in general doesn’t sound that fun,” Gabby murmured, earning her a glare from both of us. Hilary and I were a lot closer to the F-word than she was. The F-word being, in this case of course,
forty
.

“Honestly, Hil, at the moment, I don’t have an answer for that. This is new territory for me. All I agreed to was to not fool around with anybody else, which was pretty easy to do because I don’t want to fool around with anybody else.”

Gabby raised her hand. “Can I have Chris Beaumont, then? I’m available.” She was bouncing back nicely from her breakup with Mike. She’d even colored her hair a warm honey brown. No more pink tips. If nothing else good came from her heartbreak, at least it was good for her hair.

The copy of Chris’s credentialing paperwork was still sitting somewhere on my desk. I rummaged around for it and then handed it to her. “Be my guest. He likes Italian food and he’s afraid of dogs. But he’s very nice.”

I felt a minuscule twinge of remorse as she took the papers, not because I wanted to see him again, but because there’d been no good reason to not fall for him. Except, as Hilary had so eloquently put it, Tyler had gotten to my panties first. I had to believe it was more than that. I had to hope it was more than that.

“I feel like I should call Chris, though,” I said, gazing at them. “You know, just to say, ‘um, I won’t be calling you.’ What’s the protocol here?” I was completely out of my element in this scenario. I didn’t want to be rude, or presumptuous. I could just wait to see if he called me.

Hilary shook her head. “Don’t look at me. I haven’t been on a date since I got married. Not sure I can say the same for Steve, of course.”

I stole a glance at Gabby and she rolled her eyes. We’d both been pushing Hilary to confront her husband, but so far she wasn’t moving on it. She’d taken, instead, to muttering disparaging comments and didn’t want to hear our advice.

“So, are you taking Tyler to your parents’ wedding? That’s coming up pretty soon, isn’t it?” Gabby asked, redirecting the conversation.

“Oh, thank you for reminding me. I have to call my mother about my dress.” I grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled myself a note. “I haven’t asked him. That’s a big step, introducing him to my parents and taking him to the wedding. They’re not going to be thrilled with his background.”

“Or his future?” Hilary muttered. The snark was starting to show a little around her roots today, but I decided to ignore it for the sake of civility. She’d snap out of this funk. I knew she would.

“In the meantime,” I said instead, “we’re going to Jasper and Beth Baker’s baby shower because Jasper invited him, and sometime after that I should be able to move into my house. I haven’t been inside since the painting started. My decorator said he wants to do a big reveal.”