2. Jade
Iwake up to the sound of bacon.
Not the polite city kind that crackles quietly in the background while someone scrolls their phone with the other hand.
The real thing, loud pops, the hiss of grease hitting a cast-iron pan too hot for patience, the smell barreling down the hallway and through the crack under my door like it owns the place.
Which, in this house, it basically does.
For half a second I don't know where I am.
Then I open my eyes and see the pale yellow walls, the familiar crack running along the ceiling above the fan, the dresser with the loose third drawer that's been loose since I was fourteen and apparently will be loose until the end of time.
My childhood room. My parents' house. The sheets smell like fabric softener and sunshine, and outside the window the cicadas are already going, enthusiastic and relentless, like they've been waiting since sunrise for someone to notice them.
Home.
The word lands differently than I expected. Not like failure. Not like defeat. Just familiar. Worn in. The way an old sweater feels when you find it at the back of the closet and realize you forgot how much you liked it.
I sit up slowly and push my hair back from my face.
The mattress dips in the same places it always has.
My bones still ache from yesterday's drive, and from a month of sleeping badly before that, but underneath the tired there's something else, something quieter.
Like I finally stopped bracing for the next hit long enough for my body to actually rest.
I don't examine that too closely.
The kitchen is in full production when I pad down the hall in bare feet, the wood floors cool and creaking in their familiar spots.
Mom has the radio on low, some old country song that sounds like it's from a decade I only know through her playlists, and she's moving between the stove and the counter with the kind of efficient energy that makes the whole house feel like it has a pulse.
Apron tied. Hair clipped back, a few pieces already escaping around her temples.
Spatula in hand. A woman entirely in her element.
She doesn't turn around. "Well, look who's vertical."
"I was awake," I say, reaching for a mug on autopilot. "Just resting my eyes."
"For ten hours."
"Restorative rest," I correct.
She snorts. The coffee's already brewed and I pour a cup and wrap both hands around it, breathing in slow.
It tastes better here. I've never been able to explain that, it's the same beans I buy at home, the same ratio of grounds to water, but something about this kitchen makes it taste like actual coffee instead of the functional caffeine delivery system I've been running on for the better part of a decade.
Mom slides a plate in front of me before I've even pulled out a chair.
Eggs, fluffy and yellow. Bacon, the kind that actually crisps instead of going limp.
Biscuits split open and steaming, butter already pooling into the soft centers in little golden rivers.
My stomach makes a sound that is not dignified.
"You don't have to do all this," I say.
"Hush," she replies, and sits down across from me with her own coffee. "You came home. That's reason enough."
We eat. The clock above the sink ticks. Outside, a cardinal is absolutely losing its mind in the oak tree, insisting on something with impressive volume and commitment.
I eat half the biscuit before I realize I've been doing it without thinking, without checking the time or my phone or my email, just eating because the food is in front of me and my body is hungry.
It's such a basic thing. I can't remember the last time I did it.
Mom watches me with the particular quality of attention she's always had, not pointed, not interrogating, just present. The kind of watching that doesn't demand anything back but doesn't miss much either.
"I already talked to Linda this morning," she says.
Something in me loosens at her name. Linda had called me three days after I got back to the city and we'd talked for an hour, and it was the first time since the funeral that I'd felt like someone actually saw what I was carrying.
"What did she say?" I ask.
"That the appointment book's full through next Thursday and that if you need anything before you come in, to call her directly.
" Mom tears off a piece of biscuit. "She's been running that front desk for eleven years.
She kept the whole place from capsizing when your daddy stepped back. You should know that going in."
"I know," I say, and I mean it more than I would have two weeks ago. "She's always kept everything running. Since before I could read."
"The patients trust her," Mom says. "The boys trust her. She's the connective tissue of that place."
"The boys," I say, and I can hear the mild flatness in my own voice.
Mom smiles into her coffee. "Don't give me that tone."
"I'm not giving you a tone."
"You're giving me a very specific tone." She sets her mug down. "They're good men. All three of them. Your daddy wouldn't have trusted the clinic to them if they weren't, and you know better than anyone how high his bar was."
I do know that. It's the part that makes this harder, not easier.
Walking into a place that's been well cared for is a different kind of pressure than walking into a mess.
A mess gives you something obvious to fix.
A functioning system just gives you a roomful of people who've found their rhythm and have no particular reason to change it for you.
"What are they like?" I ask.
I've been asking myself this question for two weeks.
I'd been at the funeral, technically, and they'd been there too, Mom told me so afterward, said all three of them came and sat in the third row and stayed through the reception.
I have no memory of their faces. I remember the flower arrangements and the sound of the organ and the way Mom's hand felt in mine, and I remember Karen appearing at my elbow at some point with a glass of water I hadn't known I needed.
I don't remember anyone I couldn't have already named before that day.
Mom considers my question with the deliberate pause of someone choosing her words carefully, which is never a good sign.
"Declan Finch is the one who'll push back.
Military before medicine, came home after his discharge and never left again.
He's protective of that clinic the way some men are protective of their families.
" She pauses. "Actually, for him it's the same thing. "
"And the other two?"
"Sean Winslow's been there the longest of the three.
Started right out of school, and your daddy took him under his wing almost immediately.
Sean's the kind of person who makes hard days feel manageable.
He's funny, but it's not empty, he just understands people.
" She tilts her head slightly. "And then there's Rowan Callahan, who came over from England about four years ago and is the most organized human being I've ever personally witnessed.
He rearranges the supply cabinet if someone puts the gauze on the wrong shelf. "
Despite everything, the corner of my mouth moves. "And you like him?"
"I like all of them," she says simply. "They kept your daddy's work alive when he couldn't anymore. That's not nothing."
The cardinal outside has finally found something else to agitate about and gone quiet. The kitchen settles into a warm easy hum, the refrigerator, the clock, the distant sound of a lawn mower a few streets over starting up and cutting out and starting again.
I think about the clinic the way I've been trying not to, the actual physical space of it, the patient load, the systems that are almost certainly still running on Jonathan Morrison's preferred methods because nobody wanted to be the person who changed them.
The paper charts. The appointment books.
The supply orders done by hand. All the things that work until they don't, and that won't survive another five years of rural healthcare funding going the way it's been going.
None of which I'm walking in to say on day one.
Mom's watching me do the mental calculus. She has the specific patience of a woman who has watched me think my way into and out of more situations than either of us can count.
"Don't walk in trying to fix everything at once," she says.
"I know."
"I mean it. You'll be tempted. Don't."
"I said I know, Mom."
"You said it the way you always say things when you're already planning something you haven't told me.
" She reaches across and pats my hand twice, brisk and decisive, the conversation closing itself.
"Listen first. Watch them work. Let them show you what they've built before you start changing the blueprints. "
I push back from the table and carry my plate to the sink.
The water runs warm over my hands while I rinse it, and I look out the window at the back yard, the same oak tree, the same tilted bird feeder that's been tilted since a windstorm in 2009, the same perennial garden that Mom tends every spring with the seriousness of someone managing a small nation.
"I don't want to be underestimated," I say to the window.
"I know," Mom says, behind me. "So stop going in assuming you will be."
It's the most efficient way she's ever made a point, which is really saying something. I turn off the tap and dry my hands and don't answer because there isn't anything to answer with. She's right. She usually is. It's one of the more inconvenient things about her.
I grab my keys from the hook by the door, Dad's old hook, the one shaped like a fish that I used to find mortifying and now find quietly devastating, and sling my bag over my shoulder.
"Jade." Her voice follows me to the door.
I look back.
She's still at the table, mug cradled in both hands, watching me with that expression she gets that has no name but means something like: I see exactly who you are and I'm not afraid of any of it.
"They cared about your daddy," she says. "That means something."
It does. That's the part I keep coming back to, the part that cuts through all the professional calculation and lands somewhere more personal.
They were here when I wasn't. They showed up every day for a man who deserved that and more, in a building that was his whole life, and they kept it standing.
I don't know how to hold that and also walk in there ready to change things.
I haven't figured out yet if I'm supposed to be grateful or just respectful or something that doesn't have a clean name.
But I'm going to figure it out today.
I push open the door and step out into the morning.
The heat is already thick, pressing in from all sides the way June does here, and the cicadas have started up again, filling the air with that particular loud hum that is the sound of every summer I've ever spent in this town.
The clinic is a ten-minute drive. The appointment book is full through next Thursday.
Three men are already there, in a building my father built with thirty years of early mornings and late nights, and they have no particular reason to make this easy for me.
I put my sunglasses on and get in the car.
End of preview. Continue reading Knocked Up by My Doctors Next Door here.