8
Jesse was ready to head out as soon as he’d seen the last patient, but he lingered in the kitchen until Clara and Yoli got the patient checked out and went through their closing routine.
“I’m stopping by the hospital,” he told Clara, waiting with his hands in his pockets while she set the alarm system. “Might be there a few hours.”
It was already dark outside. “Okay. See you later,” she said, locking the door now.
“Drive safely,” he replied, addressing both women.
Yoli peeled out of the lot as soon as she hopped into her SUV, but Clara liked to let the old Mercedes warm up for a while. Jesse, too, sat in his running vehicle, the light from his phone screen visible in the night, for nearly ten minutes, and then when Clara backed out of her space, he followed her out of the lot. They went separate ways on Main Street, and Clara got a warm, fuzzy feeling from the knowledge that he’d been looking out for her. Any male in her family would have done the same, of course, because they’d all been meticulously trained by her safety-conscious father. But it was nice.
She spent the drive to her parents’ house thinking about him. As a teen, he’d been quiet and studious, and though he’d started out distrustful, he’d warmed to the family eventually. In his twenties he was gone a lot, and when she saw him on special occasions or brief holiday visits, he was distracted and tired. She’d obviously missed a lot of the last decade of his life, but she was getting to know him now.
She caught glimpses of the kind of doctor he was by watching him in his work, but she was picking up clues about the man, too. And the man was lonely. Something about the guarded way he interacted with her and Yoli made her think that he wasn’t used to talking to people around his own age. Did he not have friends in Austin? What had he been doing on Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, for the last several years? Who did he turn to when he needed support?
Bottom line: he needed his family, and that meant the Wilders.
It was a logistical issue, as far as Clara was concerned, and that meant there was a solution.
She didn’t have an opportunity to mull it over while she helped her father cook dinner, because they were also entertaining her housebound mother, who sat at the bar and supervised the cooking.
“Claudia visited me today,” Dr. Wilder remarked. “She’s very worried about losing the land.”
Claudia Del Amo was one of her mother’s best friends, a high school math teacher who had taught all the Wilder children. She was a widow, and kept house for her widowered brother-in-law, Memo, who was a farmer.
“I thought Joe sends her money.”
“He does sometimes, but she hasn’t heard from him in months. She asked me to pray that they’d find a buyer for their cabin. And that Joe’s not dead.”
Clara had no use for Claudia’s only son. “They’re selling the family cabin? That’s so sad. Didn’t Memo’s grandfather build it or something?”
“His father built it as a hunting and fishing retreat. Memo, Tito, and the three other brothers inherited it together, but they’re all old now, and Tito’s dead. They don’t use it, and Claudia said the grandkids don’t even go up there anymore. If they can sell it, Memo’s and Tito’s shares will keep them afloat until next fall.”
“Will Claudia get Tito’s share? Or will Joe get it?” Clara asked.
“I don’t know the details of her father-in-law’s trust,” Dr. Wilder admitted. “Claudia seems to think she’ll have it.”
“She deserves it,” Clara said, and her parents both nodded automatically. It was well known that Tito Del Amo had not been a nice man. Luckily for his family, he had died fairly young.
It really was a shame about the family cabin. It was an outdated but solid building in a very picturesque location only an hour outside of town, and three or four generations of Del Amos had been vacationing there for fifty years. The Wilder family didn’t have anything like that, but Clara could imagine how special the place was to the Del Amos and how having to sell it must hurt.
On the other hand, their loss was another family’s gain, and all at once Clara hatched the notion of Jesse snatching it off the market and using it as a personal retreat from his stressful life in Austin. The older Del Amos would be relieved to sell it, the Wilders would be ecstatic to see Jesse more often, and most importantly of all, Jesse would reestablish ties to his hometown and family.
“How much are they listing the cabin for?”
“You’ll have to ask Claudia. Why, are you interested?” Dr. Wilder asked, smiling.
Oh, yes, the plan was coming together now.
She was not precisely waiting for him to get home from the hospital that evening, but she happened to see his headlights from her room and arrived downstairs as he was coming in the door.
It was on the tip of her tongue to ask how his motorcycle patient was doing, but she observed him for a minute first.
He took off his shoes without bending down—heel to toe, one and then the other, and nudged them against the wall to be out of the way. Then he took off his coat and hung it on a hook, and then he just stood and stared at it for several seconds.
Clara moved forward, and he turned to look at her.
“Did you eat?” she asked.
“Guess I missed dinner, huh?” he answered.
“Do you want some Vietnamese chicken? It’s homemade.”
“Then how could it be Vietnamese?” he said.
First a non-answer and then a feeble attempt at humor. “Okay, shut up,” she suggested kindly, “and come sit at the bar. You can eat while I run something by you.”
He didn’t answer and she didn’t wait to see if he would follow her, but by the time she had put some chicken and rice into a bowl for him, he was sitting on a barstool.
She put the food in front of him and handed him a fork.
“Thanks. Painted your nails.”
“Uh, huh.” They were fuchsia now, with tiny pink hearts painted on them.
“Nice.”
The sincerity in the word surprised her. “Do you like it, really?”
“Yeah, it’s pretty.”
“It’s for Valentine’s.”
“Uh, huh.”
Again, she watched him for a long minute. He was doing a lot of reorganizing of his food, but not so much eating. In fact, no eating at all. She had never seen someone who needed a hug so badly, but she knew he wouldn’t accept one.
“Can I ask you a personal question?”
He looked up. His brown eyes were intense and unhappy and his gaze seemed to hold her captive. “Ask away, your highness.”
The childhood nickname did not bother her at all—never had, even when people used it sarcastically. The fact that Jesse remembered it from the old days didn’t bother her, either. “When’s the last time you exfoliated your face?”
“That’s easy. Never.”
She shook her head sorrowfully at the response.
“Wrong answer?”
“Yes, wrong answer. Come with me.”
“Clara—” He broke off as she took his hand, and he let her pull him to his feet. “What are you going to do to my face?”
“Nothing you shouldn’t be doing already,” she answered, steering him towards the staircase.
He started up the stairs, slowly and inexorably, and she kept a hand on his back as she followed him, as though that were at all necessary.
“Turn left,” she instructed at the top, and hit the lightswitch as they entered her bedroom. “Sit here, please.”
He settled into the overstuffed armchair like a man who had slept only three hours of the last thirty-six; that is to say, he did not look like a flight risk.
“There are several steps to a good at-home facial,” she told him as she gathered supplies from around her bedroom and bathroom. “So this might take a little while. But I promise you, it will be well worth it.”
“Just no makeup,” he requested.
“I wouldn’t waste my makeup on you,” she assured him.
It would have been easier to send him to wash his own face at the bathroom sink, but she wanted to give him the luxury salon experience so she washed it for him and patted it dry with a towel.
“Phase one of the exfoliation,” she said a minute later, so that he wouldn’t be startled when she touched his face again. “This is an acid exfoliating mask which we will leave on for ten minutes.”
“Uh, huh.”
She smiled at the dry response and was just glad that he could not see how much the creamy mask resembled liquid foundation as she spread it onto his forehead and cheeks. “Let me know if the tingling becomes uncomfortable.”
“Trust me, I will.”
“So, now that you can’t leave for ten minutes, how’d it go at the hospital?”
“Not good.”
“We can do your fingernails while we’re waiting.”
“I don’t want pink hearts on them.”
“I’m not going to polish them, idiot.”
“Just don’t get distracted and leave this acid on my face for too long, all right?”
“Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.” She retrieved her manicure kit. “Still tingling?”
“Yeah.”
She grabbed his left hand and inspected his nails. Then she started clipping. “Your skin is so dry. You have nice looking hands, though.”
“Uh, thanks. I guess.”
“So did that guy die or what?”
“No, he didn’t die. He’s just not doing as well as I thought.”
“Sucks.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, with the ghost of a smile.
“Did you see his family?”
“His mom was there. Little old lady.” He was quiet for a minute, and then added, “Thanked me for keeping him alive long enough for her to get to his bedside.”
Clara didn’t feel that there was anything she could say, so she just trimmed his thumbnail. “Other hand.”
He gave her his right. When she was done trimming all his nails, she wiped off the face mask and applied the next step: the scrub.
“This will feel a little scratchy,” she warned. “We’re getting rid of all the dead skin cells.”
“Okay.”
After she’d cleaned his face again, she had him move to the desk chair and set him up in front of the steamer while she went back to work on his fingernails, this time with the file.
“How long do I have to do this?” he asked doubtfully.
“Until I get all your nails filed and buffed.”
“That doesn’t sound very scientific.”
“Steam’s not going to hurt you.”
“What’s it supposed to be doing?”
“Opening your pores and giving you a dewy glow.”
“Why do you want my pores open?”
“I’m going to extract the blackheads on your nose.”
“Oh. Okay.”
She grinned at the trusting response. “Remember how I said I wanted to run something by you? My mom’s birthday is Friday, right? I was thinking of taking her somewhere for the weekend.”
“Uh, huh.”
“She’s so sick of being stuck in the house. Do you think it’d be all right for her to ride in the car for an hour or so?”
“Sure.”
“You know how the Del Amos have that big hunting cabin near Fort Davis? They go there for Christmas sometimes.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I went there in high school.”
“They’re selling it.”
“So?”
“So we could tell them you’re thinking of buying a vacation place in the area, and you want to spend a weekend there to see how you like it.”
“No.”
“Why not?” she demanded.
“I don’t want a hunting cabin near Fort Davis.”
“It’s not like you’d have to hunt. The Del Amos don’t hunt.”
“I don’t want any kind of cabin near Fort Davis or anywhere else.”
He was sounding a little like the guy in Green Eggs and Ham . But that guy had caved in the end, and Jesse would, too. “You can’t know that for sure until you’ve spent a weekend there. With us. Over my mom’s birthday.”
“Why don’t you just ask them if you can rent their cabin for the weekend?”
“They don’t rent it out. The only way they’ll do it is for a prospective buyer.”
“It’s kind of dishonest, isn’t it?”
“I think you could end up buying the place,” she said optimistically. “I don’t think it’s dishonest at all.”
“You dream big, Clara,” he said, leaning back from the steamer. “I like that about you. But I don’t want a cabin.”
Somehow it did not seem like a good time to tell him that she had already gotten permission from Claudia Del Amo for the family to spend the weekend there.
“What are you doing?” she asked, worried.
“I’m sick of the steam. I’m taking a break.”
“Fine. Back to the other chair, then.”
He moved obediently back to the armchair, leaned his head all the way back and closed his eyes.
She patted his face dry and leaned over him to go to work on his blackheads with a pair of Q-tips. “Buying the cabin would be a good compromise, since you don’t want to move here.”
“I don’t think it counts as a compromise if I don’t like a single thing about it.”
“You would like the part where you don’t buy Mom’s practice and move to Romeo, and Mom would like the part where she might actually get to see you a few times a year.” She was concentrating hard on the blackhead removal, but eventually realized that his eyes were open and he was watching her. She felt a little flutter of awareness. “Am I hurting you?”
“No.”
“Good,” she said briskly, straightening. She put a little witch hazel on a cotton ball and dabbed it on his nose.
“That stings.”
“You’ll live.” She took out a hydrating sheet mask and peeled the back of it off. “Close your eyes for a minute.”
She placed the cool gel mask carefully on his face, adjusting it to line up with his eyes and nose and mouth. Then she peeled the paper off, leaving the layer of gel to absorb into his skin.
“Feel good?”
“Cold.”
She didn’t know if he was uncomfortable or just wanted to complain, but she took the chenille throw off the end of her bed and draped it over him. “You know what I expected you to say about the cabin idea?”
“What?”
“That you aren’t going to be here anymore by the weekend. Give me your hand again. I’m going to do some cuticle oil. When are you going back to Austin?”
“I don’t know,” he sighed.
The fatalism in his voice made her smile again. “Don’t you have a ticket?”
“I want to leave Saturday. But do you think she’s going to let me walk out of here while the boys are in town for her birthday? I don’t.”
“The battle of wits and wills,” she recalled.
“That’s right.”
She dabbed a little oil onto his pinkie fingernail and massaged it into the cuticle area. “How much work can you miss?”
“I have three weeks of vacation. She was sure it would only take one.”
“You think it will take all three?”
“I do. In fact, I told them it would,” he admitted, with another big sigh. “Pretty much kissed a promotion good-bye, coincidentally. Terrible timing. But she’s never asked me for anything, remember.”
“Is the promotion a big deal?”
“Been my goal for eight years.”
She winced in sympathy. “You know, you don’t really owe her anything. She put you through school because she wanted to. It’s not like you signed your soul away.”
“I know,” he said on a yawn.
“She wouldn’t want to cost you your promotion.”
“Mm.”
She later thought it was around that point that he fell asleep. She spent the next several minutes hyping the hunting cabin and rubbing oil into his fingertips, but he didn’t say anything else, even when she wiped off the remnants of the hydrating mask, dotted his forehead, cheekbones and chin with wrinkle serum and spread it over his face in gentle circles.
Her father knocked lightly at the open door as she was applying a thick moisturizing cream. “’Night.”
“Good night, Dad,” she said, giving her most angelic smile.
The Colonel looked at the sleeping doctor in her chair, shook his head in wry amusement, and left her to it.
If Jesse had been awake he might have objected to the frankincense that came next, but he was not awake, so she got the jade roller out of her little cosmetic refrigerator and used it to spread the oil over his face in firm, outward strokes.
She was not sure why she was including so many extra steps and being so generous with her precious products. She supposed the downside of being a brilliant and perfectly calm doctor was an inordinate amount of responsibility and concern and stress, and the number-one remedy for that (assuming hugs were completely out of the question) was a quality spa experience. She hoped that even if he was no longer fully aware of the treatment he was receiving, his sleeping brain would find it a little bit comforting.
The last thing she did was moisturize his hands, which were really very dry from frequent washing, hand sanitizer and cold winds. Every good manicure ended with a massage, so as she applied the lotion she focused on the muscles and joints.
“All right, time to wake up and get out of my room,” she announced at last, gathering washcloths and towels and trash.
Jesse got up immediately—part of his doctor training, perhaps. “All done?”
“Yes. Don’t touch your face. Just wash it tomorrow morning like normal and put a little moisturizer on before you shave.”
“Uh—”
Wordlessly, she handed him a bottle of daily moisturizer.
“Thanks.”
He did not sound excited about adding another step to his morning hygiene regimen, but Clara thought that he would probably do it.
“How much do I owe you?”
“Buy the hunting cabin,” she said at once. “We’ll call it even.”
“I like you,” he said again. “But you’re nuts, lady.”
“Just think about it,” she suggested reasonably.
“I’ll sleep on it,” he promised, and shut the door behind himself.