Chapter 5
Junie
Theo Lindqvist has a laugh he uses in front of other people.
I heard it before I saw him. I was in the supply room counting gauze, which is a job for a machine and which I do by hand because it's the only twenty minutes in the day nobody talks to me, and through the wall came a laugh — warm, generous, ending on a rising note like a door opening — and my whole body went cold before my brain caught up and told me why.
Nine hundred miles. I'd put nine hundred miles and eleven months between us.
I came out into the hall with a box of four-by-fours in my hands and there he was, leaning on the counter in the good coat, making Diane at the front desk laugh, and Diane is sixty-eight and has never laughed at me once.
"June," he said.
"Junie."
"Right. Sorry. Junie." He straightened up. "God, look at you. This is a great little place."
Little. Six syllables into the conversation.
"What are you doing here, Theo."
"Locum," he said, and had the grace, or the theatre, to look sheepish about it. "Okafor's been trying to fill a physician slot since spring. Twelve weeks. I start Monday."
"Twelve weeks."
"Twelve weeks." And he smiled at me, and it was the exact smile, the one that's aimed at your face and past your ear at the same time. "Small world."
It isn't. It's a very large world, and he'd chosen a specific four-bed clinic in a nine-street town in northern Nevada, and gotten credentialed for it, which takes weeks and paperwork and a person deciding, over and over, at every step, to keep going.
Here's what three years with Theo Lindqvist is like, for the record, since I've never written it down anywhere.
In public: my biggest advocate. June's the best nurse I've ever worked with, and I've worked at Mayo.
Hand on the small of my back. Refilling my glass.
He once told a whole table at a conference dinner that I'd caught a dissection an attending missed, and he told it well, and it was true, and I glowed for a week.
In private, that same night, in the car: You know it's a little embarrassing when you tell that story yourself, though. Better coming from me.
That's the whole method. He'd hand you something and then bill you for it later, quietly, in the dark, in a voice so reasonable you'd end up agreeing.
Three years of travel nursing is what people do when they can't hack a real appointment.
Three years of you're bright, you just have no stamina for institutions.
And here's the part that still gets me — I left, I got in a truck and drove to Winnemucca and started a contract eleven days later, and I still, eleven months on, hear his voice do the color commentary on my own choices.
He's got a lease in my head he hasn't paid on in a year.
Tank met him on Thursday.
That wasn't planned either. Tank came into the clinic for the first time ever, on his own two legs, for a follow-up X-ray on the hardware — he'd agreed to it in session nineteen after I told him I couldn't clear him to ride off a hunch and a stopwatch — and he came through the door at 1:55 for a two o'clock, which for him is a declaration of principle.
Theo was at the desk.
"You must be the famous Mr. Rhodes." Hand out. Warm. "Theo Lindqvist."
Tank looked at the hand. Then he shook it.
"Doctor," he said.
"Please, Theo." He turned to me, and here's where he did it, right in the doorway of a clinic with a patient standing there. "June's told me all about the case. Nine missed appointments — quite the project. She does love a project."
And he laughed. The public one.
Nobody laughed with him. Diane didn't. I didn't.
Tank said nothing at all.
I mean nothing. I've watched that man take a room apart with a sentence.
He stood there in his coat with the light coming in behind him and he looked at Theo Lindqvist for about four seconds too long, and then he turned to me and said, "Where do you want me," and that was it, that was his whole contribution, and Theo kept talking for another minute the way a man does when the ground he expected under a joke isn't there.
The X-ray was clean. Rod's seated, screws are seated, callus is solid. I told him so with my back to the counter, and he said "Huh," and I said "That's good news, Tank, you can have a face about it," and he almost did.
And then we didn't talk about the other thing at all, and I did my afternoon, and I was fine, and I was fine at three and I was fine at four-thirty and at five-forty I came out to the lot and my truck wouldn't turn over, because that is how days go.
Tank's truck was still there. Parked at the far end, nose out.
He'd been sitting in it for three and a half hours.
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make that sound like something it wasn't. He wasn't watching me. He had a paperback and a thermos and the driver's window down, and when I walked up he looked exactly as embarrassed as a man ought to look.
"Battery," I said.
"Yep."
"Have you been out here since two."
"I'm reading a book."
"You're on page nine."
"It's a slow book," said Tank. "Get in. I'll have Otto bring the jumper in the morning."
He drove me the four miles to the rental with the heater ticking and neither of us saying anything, and then he pulled up outside and put it in park and did not turn the engine off, which meant it was my move.
I didn't move.
The porch light of the rental was on a timer that was wrong by an hour and a half. It came on while we sat there.
"You knew," I said.
"Knew what."
"Don't. You knew in about ninety seconds. In the doorway. You had the whole thing."
He looked out the windshield.
"'She does love a project,'" he said. "In front of a patient. In her own building." He turned the wheel a half inch with one finger and let it go. "That's not a man being clumsy. That's a man putting a marker down, and doing it where you'd have to be the one to make a scene about it."
"Yes."
"Yeah. Well." He shrugged, enormously. "I've done nineteen years of Sergeant-at-Arms. My whole job is knowing which guy in a bar is going to be a problem before he is one."
"And you said nothing."
"I said nothing."
"Why," I said, and it came out with more in it than I'd loaded.
And he turned and looked at me. Properly. In the dark, in a truck, with the wrong porch light doing what it does.
"Because it wasn't mine," he said. "You've got a whole history with that man and I've got about four seconds of it.
Maybe you wanted him leveled. Maybe you wanted him ignored, which, for a guy like that, is worse.
Maybe you had it handled and me opening my mouth would've been one more large man deciding what happens in a room you work in.
" He put his hand back on the wheel. "So I waited.
If you want him handled, Junie, you say the word and it's handled. But you say it."
I sat there.
Nine hundred miles I drove to get away from a man who narrated me. And here was one who'd sat in a parking lot for three and a half hours on page nine of a book, holding a thing he was fully capable of doing, waiting to be asked.
"Not yet," I said. My voice did something on the second word.
"Okay."
"I might. Later."
"Okay."
"Tank."
"Yeah."
I didn't have the rest of the sentence. That was the trouble. I had the entire feeling and no clean end to put on it, so I just sat in the passenger seat of his truck with my bag on my lap and my hand on the door handle and did not open the door.
He didn't reach over. He didn't say anything else. He put the truck in neutral and set the brake and turned the heater down one click, which is the sound a man makes when he means stay as long as you want.
The porch light went off on its wrong timer. Neither of us got out.