2. Anticipation
Chapter two
Anticipation
When I reach the Tremblays’ porch, I slide the bakery box onto my left arm and balance the berries on top so I can knock. I glance into the box and see the letter M making a break for it, sliding away from the stack.
I can’t wait to see Milo’s face when he sees these alphabet-based emotional support cookies. And the berries won’t hurt either. He loves them.
I knock and instantly hear chaos. A dog barks while children shriek, and someone yells, “Where the heck is Suzy’s other shoe?”
The door swings open a few seconds later. Mara Tremblay appears with a ponytail already slinging into chaos, a baby on her hip, and looks like she has been awake since before dawn.
Her gaze drops to the boxes. “Tell me those are really for this house.”
“Twenty-six alphabet sugar cookies and Mrs. Weaver’s nicest berries.”
Mara closes her eyes. “Bless you.”
“I heard someone placed second in the spelling bee and is having a tough time accepting it.”
“Yeah. He’s in the living room, taking it pretty hard.”
“Well, let me see what I can do about that.”
Mara steps back to let me in, the door closes, and the Tremblay house swallows me whole. Family is in motion everywhere. Six kids, all under nine, all on the move.
Their golden retriever pushes his nose into my thigh, and I shift the boxes higher before he can dislodge them from my grip.
“Milo,” Mara calls, shooing the dog back. “Annie’s here.”
“I’m not talking about it,” Milo yells.
“That sounds like talking,” I call back.
A moment passes. Then he appears at the edge of the living room in pajama pants and a Coupeville sweatshirt, hair smashed on one side, looking like a kid trying to accept defeat without understanding how it could have happened.
He’s nine and taking this very seriously.
I sit down on the couch and place the boxes in front of me on the coffee table. “You know, I’ve lost my share of spelling bees over the years.”
“You have?”
“Yes. I have. It’s going to be okay, Milo.” I pat the couch beside me. “Come sit with me and see what I brought you.”
I set the bakery box on the coffee table and lift the lid. “I brought the whole alphabet. Thought you might want to teach a few of the letters a lesson.”
His eyes lock on the cookies, and the devastated spelling bee runner-up disappears. He’s now just a kid with a grudge.
“Lieutenant is a stupid word,” he grumbles. “The U is useless.”
“I completely support that,” I say, handing him the letter U cookie.
He takes it, snaps it in two, then bites it rather aggressively, smiling the whole time.
His younger sister slides in beside him, fairy wings crooked over her pajamas. “Can I have the A?”
“No,” Milo says. “I need that one.”
“Awww, Milo,” she whines.
“I think you could probably spare a cookie for your sissy. Sharing will make you feel better.”
Mara makes a sound behind me that’s half laugh, half exhaustion. I hand her the berries before the dog gets any ideas, then look back at Milo.
“You don’t have to be happy about second place,” I tell him. “You’re allowed to be disappointed. But you also get to be proud. You can be both things.”
He studies the cookies like I’ve given him a puzzle instead of sugar. “But I didn’t win.”
“No. But you didn’t come in last either, did you?”
A sly smirk breaks across his face. “I did beat Caleb.”
“I heard there were thirty-two kids in the spelling bee. So you beat thirty of them.”
That gets me a full smile. Mara mouths thank you over his head, and I pretend not to see it because she’ll cry if I acknowledge it and I’ll cry if she starts.
Milo reaches for another cookie.
I stay long enough to get pulled into a kitchen conversation that doesn’t look important from the outside, but to a stressed-out mom of six, it is a lifeline.
Mara pours coffee into a cup without asking, the baby pats my sleeve with a sticky hand, and Milo’s sister tries to spell unicorn with three letters and an abundance of confidence.
“How’re you holding up?” Mara asks once the kids have run off, arguing over who’s the better speller.
“I’m fine.”
She gives me the look every woman in Coupeville learns by thirty. The one that says fine is a bullshit answer and she has all morning.
“I’m functioning,” I amend.
“That’s closer.”
“It’s been a weird few weeks.”
“Four,” she says gently.
I look down into the coffee. Four weeks since Dr. Arthur Painter died. Four weeks since the clinic stopped breathing and started feeling like any attempt at resuscitation would only make it worse.
“Four,” I agree.
Mara leans her hip against the counter. “Have you met him yet?”
I take a sip. “That depends on who him is.”
“The new doctor.” There it is. No transition. No warning. Just a conversational turn straight into the thing half the town has been orbiting for weeks.
“Not yet.”
Mara’s eyebrows lift. “Really?”
“Really.” I take another sip. “ All I know is his name is William Bie, and he’s coming in from Boston.”
“Boston.” She says, as if she’s acquainting herself with the word for the first time. “Big-city doctor?”
“Boston is a big city and it does have doctors, yes.”
“You know what I mean.”
I do. Everyone does. A doctor from a big city hospital system is not automatically a bad thing. Training is training. Experience is experience.
But a town like Coupeville has its own anatomy. People here don’t divide themselves neatly into categories: patient, neighbor, friend, gossip source, emergency contact, or the person who once helped your dad fix a boat trailer. They’re all of them, all at once.
A doctor who doesn’t understand that can do damage fast.
“Let’s see when he gets here,” I say.
Mara lifts a brow. “That sounds very mature.”
“Yeah, well it is what Art would want from me.”
“The new guy probably owns expensive shoes.”
“That’s not a crime.”
“No, but they reveal character.”
“Says the woman wearing slippers shaped like otters.” Despite myself, I smile into my coffee. “I’ll inspect the footwear and report back.”
“I’m serious, Annie.”
“I know. I don’t know enough about him to judge. And I’m not going to undermine a man before he even gets here.”
Mara’s expression sobers into the bruised place everyone has been stepping around. “I know. It’s just going to be strange.”
“Yes. It will be for a while.”
“The clinic without Art Painter.” Her face shifts, humor giving way to the part neither of us has been willing to touch directly. “Art knew us.”
“I know.”
“He knew Milo needed a couple minutes before anyone came near him with a needle. He knew Don pretends he can hear fine when he can’t. He knew my mother lies about taking her pills if she thinks it’ll interrupt bingo.”
“Your mother lies about more than that.”
“True, but Art knew that. He knew us,” she says softly. “Not just charts.”
Art caught everything. He had a way about him. He noticed people, the good and the bad, and treated both with loving patience for this town. He built a practice people came to when they were scared and hurt and trying not to show either.
That is the part everyone is afraid to lose.
I look toward the living room, where Milo is carefully arranging cookies on the coffee table. His little sister has stolen the S. The baby is now chewing on Mara’s dish towel. The dog has positioned himself beneath the snack radius with the faith of a saint.
Small-town medicine is not only blood pressure and lab work. It is remembering who faints at needles, who says they are fine when they are not, whose adult son needs you to explain things twice because he panics and hides it under jokes.
It is knowing which teenager will not answer direct questions with her mother in the room, which farmer will duct-tape an injury for three days before admitting defeat, and which widower needs five minutes in a chair before he can tell you why he came in.
Credentials are important. Skill is important. Training is important.
But it is relationships that keep people alive when pride, fear, money, and old habits try to interfere. That is crucial.
Mara wraps both hands around her cup. “I don’t want the clinic to become someplace where everybody feels processed.”
Neither do I.
Art has been gone for four weeks, and the unsettling part is that time has marched on. Ordinary things keep pushing forward, even after someone essential is gone.
Whether I want them to or not.
Appointments stay on the calendar. Children get fevers. People slice fingers open cutting bagels. Life keeps parading new challenges through the clinic, staffed or not.
This town needs a doctor. Ready or not.
The thought knots my stomach again. I’ve been careful not to say too much out loud, because the new doctor hasn’t done anything wrong by existing. He bought a practice. For all I know, he’s kind, decent, and fully capable of learning about everyone just like Art did.
In time.
“Change doesn’t have to mean losing everything,” I say, hating how much effort it takes to make those words sound reasonable.
Mara hears the effort and covers my hand with hers. “No. But it doesn’t mean people aren’t allowed to worry.”
“I know.”
She squeezes my hand. “I’m so sorry, Annie.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I miss him too.”
The baby chooses that moment to fling a soggy cracker onto the floor. The dog handles it with swift efficiency. Mara sighs, and the conversation breaks open, not resolved, only interrupted by the next need.
I finish enough coffee to be polite, rescue the letter S from fairy-wing custody, and make Milo promise to share. By the time I leave, the berry box is half-empty, and Milo has bright red lips, juice running down his chin, and a smile back on his face.
Mission accomplished.
Outside, Coupeville has fully woken up. The sidewalks fill with Saturday errands, late breakfasts, shopping bags, and people calling to one another across storefronts as if the street is one long front porch.
I make it three doors down before Mrs. Bellamy waves me over from outside the bookstore.
“Annie, do you know whether the new doctor’s here yet?”
I stop because this is how a ten-minute walk becomes an hour. “Not yet. Tomorrow.”
“I heard he’s from Boston.”