Oh My Stars, page 14
“Ivy?”
“Mm-hmm?” I silently willed the baby to wake up so I wouldn’t have to answer her next question, but Zuzu slept on.
“You’ve been writing stories since elementary school. It’s all you ever wanted to do. Why did you quit?”
I sighed and closed my eyes. “Believe it or not, I’ve tried over the years. I didn’t want to tell anyone, but I tried. I tried typing on the laptop until it died. I tried writing with pen and paper. Once, I even invested in this dictation software.”
“What happened?”
“The way I record a story doesn’t matter because I don’t have any more stories to tell.”
“That’s insane.”
“No, I’m a romance writer. Pretty sure a part of me has wanted to be a romance writer ever since reading Pride and Prejudice in eighth grade, but now I can’t write a happily ever after to save my soul. Writing someone else’s love story reminds me of how mine didn’t end properly.”
My sister stared through me. “Write something else, then. Write something with an unhappy ending.”
I laughed, but the sound held no humor. Movement from the bassinet caught my eye. Zuzu had jumped in her sleep, so I lowered my voice. “I don’t know how to write anything else. I don’t want to write anything else.”
“Well, maybe,” Holly said as she stood and took her usual perch on the elliptical. “Maybe you need to write a happy ending before you can find one.”
I flopped back in the recliner. “What if we each only get one chance at a happy ending in this life?”
“That’s ridiculous. Liz Taylor had seven husbands.”
I sighed. “That doesn’t mean she had seven happy marriages—”
“Eight, if you count the second marriage to Richard Burton,” Holly said breathlessly as she pushed herself on the elliptical.
Yet another reason I wanted to throw things at my sister. “That’s even worse. Besides, who would want seven husbands?”
I sat in silence, Holly’s legs churned as she chased some demon on her exercise equipment. Finally, she spoke up again. “Just finish the one on the table. It’s pretty good, but I kinda want to know what happens to the duke and the widow.”
“What the heck? Why are you reading my manuscript?”
Holly shrugged, almost losing her grip on one of the poles as she did. “It was on the table, and I was bored.”
“Nosy heifer.”
She ignored me, increasing her speed.
“Seriously, should you be exercising this late at night?”
“It’s fine. I’m conditioned.”
“What about if you’re pregnant?”
“Test’s still negative.”
If she could be blunt and in my business, then I could return the favor. “You’re not throwing up again, are you?”
She looked straight ahead and traveled even faster. “No, I am not throwing up. I had a weak moment earlier today and ate half a box of chocolate-covered Oreos. Fixing that now.”
I walked over and placed a hand on one of the poles where her hand rested. “Holly. Maybe if you let yourself have one chocolate-covered Oreo from time to time, you wouldn’t eat half a box and then feel like you needed to do . . . this.”
She stopped and looked down at me. “I didn’t ask for your advice. Besides, maybe if you would write something, anything, then you’d have a career beyond the Dollar General.”
A physical slap couldn’t have hurt worse.
“Okay. Fine. Exercise away.” I grabbed my purse. “Mind keeping an eye on Zuzu for a minute?”
“Not at all. Go blacken those lungs while I work on strengthening mine.”
By the time I got outside my hands shook so badly that I almost couldn’t light my cigarette.
And to think I’d bothered to tell her something personal about me and Corey in a weak moment.
After several clicks I managed to coax flame from the cheap Bic lighter. A cold front had moved through, and I could see my breath before I even took my first drag. But two puffs in, and I felt like I could handle my sister again.
You shouldn’t have tried to tell her what to do. You know that.
Old habits die hard, and she was my younger sister even if less than a year separated us.
When I came through the back door, there was Mom reaching under the sink for the Jack Daniel’s. She opened her mouth to comment on my smoking, then looked at her whiskey and shut that same mouth.
“Aren’t we quite the family?” I asked, the whirr from the living room telling me Holly was still on the elliptical.
“You know we are,” she said as she downed the shot.
Chapter 24
Gabe
When I got up the next morning, I didn’t know how things would go. After all, Dad had bared his soul to me. Did he have any other stories of my mother to tell me? I descended the stairs cautiously and found him in the kitchen. When I didn’t see him, I went straight for the barn where Julian had already started getting the goats up.
We worked in companionable silence, and by the time I got back to the house, Dad had hobbled to the kitchen where he sat at the table with a cigarette in one hand and a coffee mug in the other. “We’re out of honey buns.”
From him, such pronouncements always came with such gravitas you almost expected cable news outlets to show up and declare it breaking news: Today in rural West Tennessee a local goat farmer proclaimed, “We’re out of honey buns.” Let’s go to our panel of pundits to get their take on this dire situation.
“Hit me with some of that,” he added, gesturing toward the coffee pot.
I almost regretted that Dad had interrupted my inner monologue in which people on camera argued over the merits and demerits of the honey bun, but I refilled his cup anyway. Once I’d fixed a bowl of cereal, I sat down across from the old man.
“Since we’re out of honey buns, why don’t you take me to get a sausage biscuit over at the McDonald’s?”
I’d just poured milk over my cereal, that first spoonful halfway to my mouth. It was on the tip of my tongue to say McDonald’s was the last place I wanted to go, but going for breakfast reminded me of our trip to Burger Paradise so long ago. I put my almost full bowl of cereal in the sink.
Just because he was doing the asking didn’t mean I couldn’t have a little fun, though. “Want to go in the Jaguar?”
“Hell, no. I can’t get in and out of that thing, and it rides rougher than a cob.”
“I guess I’ll go bring your truck around, then,” I said, trying hard not to smile and give away the fact I’d never intended to take the Jag. The sports car had been lounging in the garage the whole time I’d been home. I was thinking about trading her in for a truck or a Jeep or something more practical.
I’d hardly taken two steps outside when my phone rang. I immediately recognized the number as that of the law firm that was handling my case. Hopefully, my lawyer had an update for me because the whole thing was dragging out far longer that it should.
“Why, hello, Katherine.”
“Good morning, Gabriel.”
Katherine, like my ex-wife, was sleek and beautiful. I had hired her, however, because she was an exceptional lawyer. She always called me Gabriel, which made me want to call her Katie for some perverse reason.
“Do you have any news for me?” I could hear her shuffling papers on the other end of the line. It wasn’t like Katherine to beat around the bush.
“The insurance company is probably going to settle.”
To settle? But the whole claim was utterly ridiculous. Stunned, I sat on an upside down five-gallon bucket that had collected water overnight, soaking my ass in the process. As I hopped back up, I said, “But I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I know, Gabriel, but the insurance company may not want to chance a trial.”
“It was meningococcal meningitis! By the time the child got to us, it was too late. Surely anyone can see that. It’s sad, and I feel for them, but there was nothing we could do.”
“And you may be right, but there’s nothing I can do to ensure a jury would see things your way. There’s no guarantee that you would win in court, and if you decide to go to trial against the wishes of your insurance company, then you’ll be on the hook for a million or more. So I want you to think hard before you—”
“A settlement would be a black mark on my record. I should be able to defend myself.”
“Gabriel, listen to me. If there’s a settlement, it would include a stipulation that there was no wrongdoing on your part.”
I sighed. “That stipulation isn’t worth the paper that it’s printed on, and we both know it.”
She said nothing because she knew I was right.
“But it’s not over yet, right?” I was grasping, and we both knew it.
“No. Not yet, but you need to prepare yourself for the idea of a settlement.”
We said our goodbyes, but I wasn’t about to consider settling. Easy for the lawyers and the insurance companies, they got to duke this out and play by their own asinine rules. When I’d decided to go to medical school, I hadn’t put much thought into cases like these. I foolishly thought doctors who did the right thing wouldn’t be sued.
I should’ve known better. People like the Burtons were wealthy enough to think they could buy their way out of any problem, but sometimes a solution couldn’t be bought. Bacteria didn’t discriminate between rich and poor.
I thought back to Abigail, the Burtons’ middle daughter. I’d been taking care of her since she was a newborn, and she was a pistol. The nurses used to warn each other when she was led back to an examination room. She’d been known to take cabinet doors off their hinges or try to eat a latex glove or spin around on my chair until she barfed. It was almost as though she weren’t supervised, which, I thought, had been the case since her mother bought that first Blackberry.
Probably, the Burtons were suing me out of some form of guilt. They hadn’t thought anything would happen to one of their kids, and they’d been distracted by work and sports practices and music lessons and all of the things that parents rushed around to do. Abigail’s mother admitted to me that day that she hadn’t take her daughter seriously when she first told her about chills and a bad headache. It took throwing up to get her mother’s attention. Unfortunately, that particular kind of meningitis could go from first symptom to death in a few hours, and that is exactly what happened.
They’d latched on to how a harried nurse had put the wrong file outside the wrong door, delaying their daughter’s treatment by maybe five minutes. Those five minutes wouldn’t have made a difference, but they didn’t want to believe that—especially not the mother who’d brushed off Abigail’s complaints.
Dammit, I had loved that little girl, too. She’d been one of my first newborns, and I’d foolishly thought I might one day get to hold her first baby. She told me she was going to be a doctor just like me and the cartoon character on the Disney Channel. I’d let her practice with my stethoscope that day at her five-year-old checkup. As she got older I’d ask about her math and science grades. She always had all As in those, but she hated English with a passion.
Why does life have to sometimes be so shitty?
It is what it is.
Aunt Vi’s mantra came back to me, but it didn’t satisfy me. It never did. I’d become a doctor so I could solve problems, and it was disheartening to know some problems couldn’t be solved, no matter how much education and experience I had.
The one problem I could solve was changing my pants and taking my father into town for a breakfast at McDonald’s.
After enduring Dad’s laughter at the wet spot on my pants, I changed, and we went for what I’d assumed would be an uneventful trip to McDonald’s.
I didn’t count on running into Dr. Malcolm.
“Hey, Doc, how’s the little girl I sent you?” I asked as I walked over to where the good doctor stood in line.
“She has a follow-up in a couple of days, and I told the mother to call me if the wound didn’t improve.” His clipped tone suggested he didn’t want to talk to me.
Unfortunately for him, I didn’t always take a hint. “Thanks for your help. I couldn’t have—”
“You’re not welcome,” he said, his eyes glued to the menu.
“What?”
He made me wait while he ordered his Egg McMuffin and coffee. Once he’d received his order he sat down in a booth across the restaurant from Dad. I followed the doctor and slid into the seat across from him despite his scowl. “What are you talking about? The little girl was in danger of sepsis.”
Dr. Malcolm put down his sandwich and stared through me. “Either fish or cut bait, boy. I can use all the help I can get, but I don’t need people coming in and questioning me because they’ve seen you.”
“That wasn’t my intention. What could Olivia have possibly questioned you on?”
“When I tried to give her the generic form of Silvadene, she insisted on having exactly what you said. Now I may not be young and handsome, but I am still the only practicing doctor around here, so either come be a part of the solution or, at the very least, quit causing problems.”
I didn’t even think to tell her the Silvadene might come as a generic. “I was trying to help.”
He put his sandwich down again. “Yeah, you’ll see what kind of help you’ve done. That girl will tell people about you, and someone’s going to show up at your door with a problem you can’t fix. You mark my words.”
I swallowed hard. What would I do if a farmer with a bloody arm dangling only by a sinew showed up on my front porch? Or if someone called me to a field where someone lay under a piece of farm equipment? People didn’t necessarily understand that doctors were limited in which patients they could see. Sure, there were emergency situations, but I was certified in pediatrics. Others might not understand or respect that distinction, especially since I hadn’t spelled it out for Olivia.
“Is the need that great?”
Dr. Malcolm scoffed and almost choked on his Egg McMuffin. “Come stick with me for a day and tell me what you think.”
“All right. I will.”
He stared at me as if he hadn’t believed I would actually take him up on his offer.
“If you’ll tell me where I can find Taylor so I can check on her.”
He gave me a lecture about HIPAA—something I already knew plenty about—then segued into how in his day people could come in, see him, pay a reasonable amount and leave. I didn’t want to talk about insurance or HIPAA or bureaucracy. In the corner of my eye, I saw Dad shifting in his seat. I hadn’t even bought our breakfast yet.
I turned to Dr. Malcolm. “I’ll be there on Monday morning, how about that?”
Chapter 25
Ivy
While Zuzu took her morning nap, I read through the old copy of Her Mad Vicar scribbling in the margins and making notes about how the story should end. Reading through the pages of my manuscript, I felt a hundred years old. I wasn’t the same woman who’d written this story about a Regency widow hiding in the country. The hero thinks she poisoned her husband and is pretending to be a vicar to gain her trust and get to the bottom of things. To make matters worse, I’d decided to make her a virgin widow.
Because that didn’t sound ridiculous at all.
I banged my head against the dining room table.
The whole story was stupid. I’d never intended for it to be a serious story, more of a madcap semi-mystery with a marriage of convenience thrown in a third of the way through after the vicar got caught being a little frisky with the widow and then had to reveal his true identity and marry her. Only he still thought she might have poisoned her first husband—especially when he discovers she’s a virgin because, come on, her husband had been a mean septuagenarian and the widow had been only eighteen when she’d married him.
Oh, the intrigue!
Oh, the silliness.
You are too cynical for your own good.
The idea of writing a trilogy about widows had come to me one day when Mom was talking about her book club, a group of widows who’d named themselves after a certain type of lingerie. The publisher had even labeled my books as the Merry Widows Series, which had been an interesting brand and a fun nod to Mom’s book club.
At the time, I’d never dreamed I would be a widow one day myself.
And the minute I became a widow the joke wasn’t all that funny.
Maybe if I finally joined her book club, I’d relearn the merry part.
I should probably do some research on Regency lingerie and when the term Merry Widow originated....
Or I could be procrastinating.
Sit down and read the pages. All you have to do is read the pages.
And so I did. I sat at the table and marked through the rest of the manuscript until Zuzu demanded that I feed her and change her and supervise some tummy time. She seemed a little fussier than usual, but her slightly runny nose had quit a day or two before. Thank goodness it had because neither she nor I were a fan of the suction device.
She perked up when we read a cloth book about a lost hippo. Spoiler alert: The hippo wasn’t lost long since the book was only six pages. Finally, we rattled plastic keys.
“Shake it, shake it,” I was saying when Mom came into the room. She did a little hip shimmy.
“Mom. I was talking to Zuzu, and I meant the keys.”
“Are you saying you’re not ready for this jelly?”
My mom, ladies and gentlemen. So hip and with it—or she would’ve been ten years ago or so when that song actually came out. “I am never ready for that jelly. However, a peanut butter and jelly would be divine since Holly is running late, and I need to be out the door in ten.”
“Fine,” she said with an overly dramatic sigh. “I’ll make us some sandwiches even though you do it so much better than I do.”
“Oh, yes. I am nationally recognized for my PBJ skills.” The you make it so much better than I do trick worked for years on things such as browning ground beef, making sandwiches, and capping strawberries. I was in college before I realized what my sneaky mother had been up to.
