Chapter 18 #2
The dental assistant led us down a hallway to a private room. A dentist's chair dominated the space, surrounded by equipment I recognized from my own dental visits but which Scout had probably never seen before. Lights and drills and suction tubes and all the other apparatus of modern dentistry.
Scout sat in the chair like she was sitting in an electric chair. Rigid and controlled and utterly lost.
The dentist arrived within minutes, a woman in her fifties. She took one look at Scout's face, at the swelling and the gray exhaustion, and her expression shifted from professional neutral to professional concern.
"I'm Dr. Klein. Let's take a look."
She pulled on gloves, adjusted the overhead light, and gently tilted Scout's head back. Scout's hands gripped the armrests.
"She hasn't been to a dentist since childhood," I said. "Maybe not even then. Grew up off-grid. Her father raised her outside the system. She's been treating this herself with clove oil and salt rinses. Home remedies."
Dr. Klein nodded without surprise. She'd probably seen this before. People who fell through the cracks of conventional society, who showed up only when things got bad enough that they had no other choice.
"I understand," she said. "Liberty, I'm going to explain everything I'm doing before I do it. You can ask me to stop at any time. Okay?"
Scout nodded.
"Good. Now let's see what we're dealing with. Mr. Harmon? You can wait outside. We have an excellent coffee machine."
I took the hint and stepped back toward the door.
"I'll be in the waiting room," I said. "Right outside."
Scout's eyes found mine. Something passed between us. Gratitude maybe, or trust. Or just the acknowledgment that she was in unfamiliar territory and I was the only familiar thing she had to hold on to.
I went to the waiting room.
The coffee was terrible. Burned and bitter and probably hours old. I drank three cups anyway, just to have something to do with my hands.
I pulled out my phone and started making calls. The wood stove in the cabin needed servicing before winter. I'd been putting it off, but a chimney fire would be a hell of a way to end my first year in the woods. I found a guy in Sequim who did wood stove maintenance. Left a voicemail.
Then the septic system. The county required certification for properties with natural water features. Something about protecting the watershed. My pond and stream were beautiful, but they came with paperwork.
I found a septic company and talked to a woman who sounded tired of answering questions. Set up an appointment and noted it on my calendar app.
Two hours passed.
I watched people come and go. A man with a swollen jaw. A woman with a screaming toddler. An old guy who fell asleep in his chair and snored loud enough to make people stare.
Then the door opened and Scout walked out.
She moved carefully, like her body wasn't quite her own yet. Her cheek was still swollen, but differently now. The aftermath of work rather than the progress of infection. The left side of her face was slack, numb from whatever they'd given her.
She had cotton stuffed in her mouth. She looked dazed as she scanned the room, seeking me out.
I stood up. She walked toward me with an expression I hadn't seen before. Not gratitude exactly. Something more complicated than that.
She had let someone take care of her. And she didn't have a ready category for what that felt like.
"Bathroom," she said.
The word came out slurred, distorted by the numbness. She pointed down the hall.
"Go ahead. I'll handle things here."
She nodded and walked away. I went to the reception desk. The same woman from before looked up from her computer.
"I need to pay for Liberty Flint's procedure."
She pulled up the account. "Emergency walk-in abscess drainage, temporary seal, antibiotics. Total will be $1497."
I handed over my credit card without flinching. It was a lot of money, but Scout needed the work done, and she had no way to pay for it, and Abner was out in the woods tracking a coyote. Some things you just did because they needed doing.
"She'll need to come back in a month for a follow-up," the receptionist said. "The abscess site needs to be checked to make sure it's healing properly. No emergency fee, so it will only be $300 or so."
"Got it. Can I schedule that now?"
She gave me a date. I put it in my phone.
"Doctor Klein noted that she can't eat anything solid for a few hours, and the antibiotics might cause some stomach distress. But ice cream might be soothing and keep the swelling down."
"I'll keep that in mind."
Scout came back from the bathroom looking slightly better. The color was returning to her face, or at least to the part that wasn't swollen.
"Ready?" I asked.
She nodded.
I didn't tell her what I'd paid. She didn't need to know. Not yet, maybe not ever, if I could help it.
We walked out of the medical center into the afternoon sun.
Scout blinked in the brightness, looking around at Port Angeles like she was seeing it for the first time.
Which, in a way, she was. She'd passed through towns before, but always in transit.
Always with her father, always focused on getting somewhere else.
Now she was here. Standing still. Looking.
"You hungry?" I asked.
She touched her numb cheek. "I can't really feel my mouth."
"Ice cream. It's cold. It'll be soothing. And you don't really have to chew. Besides, it's doctor's orders."
Scout considered this. "I'd like that."
The waterfront in Port Angeles had that Pacific Northwest tourist town feel.
Gift shops selling orca magnets and salmon t-shirts.
Restaurants with outdoor seating and views of the harbor.
People walking dogs and pushing strollers and enjoying a mild spring day that made you forget how gray and rainy it got the rest of the year.
I found an ice cream shop near the water. Scout stood in front of the display case for a full minute, studying the options with the same intensity she brought to everything else.
"There are so many," she said.
"Pick whatever looks good."
"They all look good."
"Then pick the one that looks best. If you don't like it, I'll get you something else."
She chose blackberry. Because of course she did.
We sat on a bench facing the street. Scout ate her ice cream carefully, compensating for the numbness on one side of her mouth. Between bites, she watched the world go by.
Port Angeles wasn't a big city, not by any standard. But compared to Port Chasten, it might as well have been Seattle. Cars and trucks and delivery vans. People of all ages, all backgrounds, all dressed in ways that reflected a broader world than the one Scout knew.
A group of teenagers walked by, all of them staring at their phones, somehow navigating the sidewalk without looking up.
"How do they not collide with things?" Scout asked.
"Practice. And peripheral vision."
"It seems inefficient."
"It is. But that's how it works now. Everywhere."
A young couple walked by on the sidewalk. They were holding hands. The boy said something, the girl laughed, and they leaned into each other as they walked. Young love, obvious and sweet and completely unselfconscious.
Scout watched them pass. She didn't say anything. But I saw her eyes follow them until they disappeared into the crowd.
The drive home was quieter. The K-Pop played at a lower volume, background noise rather than a distraction. Scout leaned her head against the window, watching the forest roll past.
The numbness was starting to wear off. I could see her testing her jaw occasionally, feeling where the tooth had been fixed.
We'd been driving for about an hour when she spoke.
"I didn't expect that," she said. "A person fixing another person like that. Thank you."
"The dentist fixed you. That's her job."
"You know that's not what I mean."
I did know. I kept my eyes on the road.
"Thomas." Her voice was different now. Serious. "You helped when I asked. You drove me two hours. You walked me through that place when I didn't know what to do or where to go or how any of it worked. You waited. You paid for everything. I know you did."
"It just needed doing, so I did it."
The trees blurred past. The road curved and straightened and curved again.
"Nobody has ever done that for me," Scout said. "Taken care of me like that. My father has done everything he could to raise me and teach me. But this was different. I was helpless, and you didn't make me feel helpless. I was scared, and you didn't make me feel small for being scared."
"Scout..."
"I am expressing my gratitude. Let me finish."
I shut up.
"You are a good man, Thomas Harmon. I didn't know there were men like you. In the books I read, men are complicated. They have secrets and darkness and hidden motives. The Heathcliffs and the Rochesters. But you are just... good. Straightforward. Kind."
I felt her eyes on my face. That intensity she brought to everything. I didn't look.
"There's not much to understand. I'm just a guy who did what anyone would do."
"That isn't true. Not everyone would do what you did. Most people wouldn't. My father says most people only help when it costs them nothing. You paid a cost today."
I didn't know what to say to that. Scout was twenty-one years old. In some ways, she was the smartest young woman I'd ever met. She could quote Thoreau and identify plants and navigate forests and think through problems with a clarity that made me feel slow.
In other ways, she was shockingly naive. The world of people, the world of relationships and emotions and the complicated mess of human connection, was as foreign to her as K-Pop had once been.
And she was beautiful. Long blonde hair and blue eyes and a body that came from a lifetime of physical work rather than a gym. She was looking at me like I was something worth studying, something worth understanding, and I was old enough to know what that look meant.
I was also old enough to know better.
"You're very welcome," I said carefully. "You were hurting and I helped. That's all it needs to be."
Scout was quiet for a while after that, but I could feel her still watching me. Still trying to figure something out.
Abner was sitting on my porch steps when we pulled up to the cabin.
He stood as I killed the engine. He was wearing the same flannel and canvas he always wore, the big revolver on his hip, his gray beard catching the late afternoon light.
He'd been waiting. I could tell from the way he stood, the tension in his shoulders. He'd come home and found Scout gone and had figured out where she might be.
Scout got out of the truck before I could say anything. She walked toward her father and I saw the relief on his face. Profound and obvious and completely unguarded.
Then his expression went back to normal, stoic and controlled. Abner Flint, a backwoods philosopher, asking for nothing and expecting nothing.
"Did you get the coyote?" Scout asked.
"No. He eluded me." Abner touched her face gently. "What happened?"
"The tooth got worse," Scout said. "Much worse. I couldn't sleep. Thomas took me to a dentist in Port Angeles."
Abner's eyes moved to me. I was still standing by the truck.
"They drained it. I had an abscess, and the infection was bad. But they fixed it. They gave me medication." She held up a small paper bag. "Antibiotics to prevent further infection."
"A dentist," Abner said.
"Yes, in a large medical center. It had four stories, Father. And so many people. And machines I'd never seen. And Thomas was there with me the whole time."
Abner was quiet. His eyes moved between his daughter and me, reading the space between us.
"Afterward, Thomas took me for ice cream," Scout said. "At a shop near the water. I had blackberry ice cream. It was remarkable."
"Ice cream."
"Yes. And we listened to K-Pop in the truck. Both directions."
Something flickered in Abner's expression. Surprise or amusement or both, it was hard to tell with him.
"K-Pop," he said.
"It's Korean pop music. Very energetic. I find it invigorating."
Abner looked at me again. I shrugged.
"She asked for it," I said. "I just turned it on."
The old man walked toward me. He moved in that deliberate way he always had, no wasted motion, nothing extra. He stopped about three feet away.
"How much did it cost?"
"Don't worry about it."
"I asked how much it cost."
His voice was quiet, but there was iron underneath it.
"The procedure was significant," I said. "Emergency appointment, antibiotics, follow-up appointment scheduled. She'll need to go back in a month."
"How much?"
I looked at him. His blue eyes, the same color as his daughter's, held mine.
"Fifteen hundred," I said.
Abner didn't flinch, but I saw the shock behind his eyes. Fifteen hundred dollars was a lot of money for anyone. For a man who lived on a small military pension and rented goats to clear brush, it was enormous.
"I'll pay you back," he said.
"Look Abner, you don't have to..."
"I will pay you back." His tone made clear this was not a discussion. "A man settles his debts. 'Owe no man anything, but to love one another.' Romans thirteen, verse eight."
I nodded. There was no point in arguing. He would pay me back somehow. That was who he was.
"Fair enough," I said.
Abner drew in a sharp breath and started coughing. Scout rubbed his back as he bent over, coughing and wheezing. I waited, now used to Abner's breathing problems.
When he finally looked up, he held my gaze with his watery eyes. Then he extended his hand.
I shook it. His grip was strong, the hand of a man who had worked his whole life.
"'Greater love hath no man than this,'" he said quietly. "'That a man lay down his life for his friends.' John fifteen, thirteen. You didn't lay down your life. But you laid down your time and your money and your comfort when you had no obligation. That is noted."
He released my hand and turned back to his daughter.
"Come, Liberty. You need rest. And I need to hear about this K-Pop."
Scout glanced at me over her shoulder as she followed her father toward the tree line. That complicated expression was still there, the one I didn't quite have a category for.
"Thank you, Thomas," she said.
Then they were gone, disappearing into the forest the way they always did. Like they'd never been there at all.