Chapter 14 #3
My team was good — I could see it within the first hour, the texture of a unit that had been well run and was ready for someone to take it further.
There were protocols I wanted to update, systems I wanted to streamline, relationships I needed to build carefully, and none of it was going to happen in a day, and I was entirely at peace with that.
Dr. Howe stopped by at eight as promised, warm and efficient, checked in for twenty minutes, and left me to it.
Patricia brought me a patient list without being asked — which I noted and would remember.
A resident named Bradley came to introduce himself and shook my hand with the slightly terrified energy of someone who had heard things about me and wasn't sure if they were good things or bad things.
"Relax," I told him. "I don't bite. But I do have high standards, so let's talk about what those look like."
He relaxed, slightly.
The moment I'd been waiting for came mid-morning, during teaching rounds with the OB residents.
I watched my nurses step in with the quiet authority of people who knew their unit inside out, explaining procedures, answering questions, modeling the kind of calm competence that only came from experience.
This was the teaching component Dr. Howe had described in the interview — the thing that had made me lean forward in my chair. Seeing it in action was even better than I'd imagined.
By the end of the day I knew six nurses by name, had identified two protocol gaps I was going to address in my first staff meeting, and had mentally drafted what I wanted to say to Bradley about finding his footing.
I drove to after-care feeling the exhaustion of a first day done right.
Justin was in the middle of a card game with Andy Martino when I arrived, both of them hunched over a table with the concentration of seasoned gamblers.
Andy's mother, a warm woman named Lisa who had also just relocated from Cincinnati for her husband's job, was sitting nearby scrolling her phone.
We introduced ourselves with the slightly giddy energy of two people who had both had big first days and needed to debrief with another adult.
"These two found each other at drop-off, before they'd even made it to class," she said, nodding at the boys. "Andy hasn't stopped talking about Justin since I walked in. Apparently your son knows something called the Flip."
"He's been practicing with a stuffed bear," I said.
"Of course he has." She laughed. "Same time tomorrow?"
"Same time tomorrow."
Justin lost the card game — disputed — said goodbye to Andy with the easy confidence of someone who had known him for years rather than days, and came to collect his backpack and Carter Junior.
"He's also in after-care," he told me, as if I hadn't been standing right there. "So we can play every day."
"Perfect," I said.
I called Anne from the car on the way home.
"Tell me everything," she said, before I'd gotten a word in.
So I did — Patricia and the coffee machine and Bradley and the teaching rounds and Andy Martino and his mother Lisa and the card game that Justin disputed losing.
Anne listened to all of it with the quality of attention she brought to things that mattered, asking the right questions, laughing at the right moments.
"I knew it was going to be good," she said, when I finished. "I knew from the second you described Dr. Howe."
"It's better than good." I stopped at a red light. "It's exactly what I wanted."
"Then come celebrate." I could hear her already moving around. "Taco takeout. Our place. Bring Justin. Carter too, if he's around."
"Anne, you don't have to?—"
"Jess. I have been waiting to have a casual dinner with my best friend since you moved here. Get in the car."
So that was how we ended up — six of us around Liam and Anne's kitchen table on a Monday evening, taco containers spread across every available surface, Finn and Justin conducting some kind of elaborate competition involving who could build the tallest taco before structural failure occurred.
Liam had opinions about taco architecture that he shared at length.
Carter disagreed with equal conviction. Anne and I sat at one end of the table and talked about nothing and everything — her clinic, my unit, what it was going to be like when we could do this every week instead of every few months.
"A Tuesday," Anne said. "Just because we can."
"Next week," I said. "I'll bring dessert."
Justin's taco collapsed dramatically. Finn declared victory. Justin disputed this on structural grounds that he presented with considerable passion.
Carter looked at me across the table. The real smile.
I looked back at him, at this table, at these people — at Anne laughing at something Liam said, at Finn and Justin already rebuilding, at the fall evening outside the window and the city that was becoming mine — and felt something settle so completely and so quietly that I almost missed it.
This was it.
Not the job, not the house, not the address. This — the table, the tacos, the noise, the people who showed up just because they could now.
This was what I'd moved for.
I picked up my taco and thought about calling Rosa tomorrow to tell her about Gerald the duck.
She was going to love that.