11
He should have gone upstairs immediately after dinner.
Jesse wasn’t sure why he hung around when Col. Wilder built up the fire and the women moved to the couch to get comfortable. That was his cue to excuse himself, but he found himself taking an armchair.
It was easy to remember how it had felt living in the big old house. So many years had passed, but the place had once been home . They had felt like real family.
He didn’t want to think about that, so he turned to Clara, who was looking elegantly casual in some kind of matching leisure suit. “Who you texting?”
“Birdie,” she answered absently.
He recalled her cousin Elisabeth from the old days: blonde, soft-spoken, slightly older than Clara but happy to follow her lead. A yes man, probably. “Is she trying to tell you that witchy means enchanting? Don’t believe her.”
“We’re not talking about you ,” Clara said defensively, looking up from her phone.
“Oh.”
She narrowed her eyes. “What does it mean? Evil?”
“Well—” He let the word trail off.
“Let’s play Racko,” Dr. Wilder interrupted.
He’d forgotten about Racko. They’d played the card game dozens or hundreds of times after family dinners, sometimes with so many people that they had to combine two or three decks of cards.
And then? Then he’d graduated from med school and never heard from any of them again, and now he knew it was because Dr. Wilder had told her kids that he wanted it that way. He couldn’t think of any legitimate reason for her to do that, and it was getting harder to pretend she hadn’t done it.
“I’m going to bed,” he announced abruptly, and got to his feet. “Thanks for dinner.”
“Good night,” his foster parents said in unison.
“Don’t forget to wash your face,” Clara said earnestly. “And use the moisturizer I gave you.”
Talk about wacky priorities. He yanked lightly on her hair when he walked past her—sign language for no hard feelings .
“Ow,” she growled, and he smiled faintly to himself as he started up the dark stairs.
Why had he told her that she should move back to Austin? Good thing she hadn’t taken him seriously.
As he entered Romeo Family Health on Thursday, Jesse was aware that he had developed an unprofessional new habit of looking forward to seeing what his office manager would be wearing. Yoli encouraged it, of course, by exclaiming over Clara’s outfit every morning like it was a new episode of her favorite show, but Jesse should have been impervious.
Margo was his right-hand man in Austin, and she wore scrubs every day. He was not even sure, now that he thought about it, if she always wore the same color. And that was the way it should be.
Today Clara was wearing a long, shiny pink skirt with about a million pleats in it, a tee in the same shade of pink, and high strappy heels in metallic silver.
“Futuristic,” he said.
“Thank you,” she replied.
“February’s not kidding around,” Yoli announced, coming in. “Brr! Ooh, look at you, Clara Wilder!”
“Thank you,” Clara said again, dipping into a graceful curtsey.
“Well, it’s Day 4 of being a small-town GP. How are you holding up, Dr. Flores?”
“Fine, thanks.”
“We’re closed tomorrow for Dr. Wilder’s birthday.”
“Yes, I know.”
“So is this your last day? Or are you gonna be here next week?”
He took a moment to fantasize about flying home on Sunday afternoon, but he knew it wasn’t in the cards.
“You don’t have to stay another whole week,” Clara spoke up from the reception desk. “This morning Mom said she can work next week. She said it’s a lot easier to get around now, and she can sit down most of the time anyway.”
It was hard to believe that Clara could be so intelligent and yet so na?ve when it came to her mother. “She knows she definitely shouldn’t be working yet. And she knows I know it, too.”
“Does that mean you’re staying?” she asked curiously.
Hadn’t he known from the beginning that he would? “Guess so.”
“You’ll be here on Valentine’s Day after all!” Yoli pointed out. “I think I might know someone you—”
“No, thanks,” he said firmly. The last thing he needed was to start a relationship in this town.
“He doesn’t do Valentine’s Day,” Clara reminded her. To him, she said, “Do you want me to change your flight?”
“I never booked one,” he admitted.
She raised her eyebrows. “I thought you said you were leaving at dawn on Saturday.”
“Wishful thinking.”
“Why are you in such a big rush to get back home?” Yoli asked, apparently unaware that they weren’t best friends and his life was none of her business. “This job is easy, the people are all nice—and this weekend you get to go on vacation! You must have a girlfriend in the city, huh? If you had a dog you would’ve brought it with you.”
“It’s not that he wants to be there ,” Clara answered before he could. “He just wants to be not here . It’s our secret family dysfunction.”
“Secret family dysfunction?” Yoli repeated. “This I gotta hear.”
“Shut up, Clara,” Jesse warned.
“Tell me when he goes in his office,” Yoli whispered to Clara.
“I don’t know it,” Clara replied, for once sounding irritable. “It’s between him and my parents. Something happened six years ago and he never came home again.”
“ Austin is home,” Jesse corrected, feeling like a jerk for disabusing her, but she was so na?ve. “It always has been. Your house was just a foster home. I aged out, and there was no reason to come back.”
Clara just looked at him, as serious as he had ever seen her.
“Well, this took a turn,” Yoli said, clearly uncomfortable. “I’ll just butt out now. I’m going to go get some coffee.”
No one said anything, and she looked uneasily at each of them and left the room.
The silence stretched out. Clara, of course, wasn’t too shy to maintain eye contact. But she didn’t say anything.
“What?” he demanded finally.
“Nothing.”
“Good.” On that note, he stepped into Dr. Wilder’s office and shut the door, painfully aware that he wouldn’t soon forget the expression on her face, or the knowledge that he had put it there.