Chapter 7
Junie
The complaint came on clinic letterhead, which was the cruelest part, because it meant somebody had typed it in the same room where I keep my coffee cup.
Concerns regarding professional boundaries in the care of an established patient. Reporting physician: T. Lindqvist, MD.
Two pages. Dates. My mileage log — my own mileage log, which I file monthly and which shows a green Tacoma at a patient's residence four afternoons a week for eleven weeks.
Documented visits outside a clinical setting.
Care provided at a private residence without a second staff member present.
A note that the patient had been observed transporting the reporting nurse in his personal vehicle after hours.
Every line of it true.
That's what nobody understands about a man like Theo. He doesn't lie. Lies are for people who need them. He takes twelve true things and stacks them so the shadow they throw looks exactly like the shape he wants, and then he stands back with his hands open and says I only wrote down what happened.
Okafor read it at his desk with his glasses off, twice.
"I have to forward this," he said.
"I know."
"I don't want to forward this."
"I know that too."
He put the glasses down. Sixty-one years old, nine years past when he wanted to be done, holding a piece of paper that was going to cost him the only nurse who'd stayed past a summer.
"For what it is worth, Junie, and it is worth nothing at all — the man has been here five weeks and has not once made a home visit.
In a county this size. He has not seen the Pruitt place, he has not seen the Mendes girl with the pump.
" He rubbed his eyes. "You did the medicine.
He did the paperwork. The board will only read one of those. "
"How long?"
"Two weeks to respond. Then a review." A pause. "Your contract has three weeks left on it."
Three weeks. He didn't say the rest, because he didn't have to. A contract that ends before a review is a contract that never gets reviewed. Everybody walks. Nobody has a hearing. The complaint goes in a drawer in Reno and follows me at whatever speed those things follow a person.
Theo had counted the weeks. He'd counted them before he ever got in the car.
I packed that night.
I want to be honest about how fast it was.
Forty minutes. That's the whole of it — eleven months of a life goes into two duffels and a plastic tub in forty minutes, and the reason it goes in forty minutes is that I have never once unpacked in a way that made it harder.
Nothing on the walls. Nothing in the freezer past two weeks out.
It's a system. I built it at nineteen and I've been calling it efficiency for eight years.
I got the tub out to the truck and I was standing in the dark going through the mileage log again when headlights came up the road and a Bronco pulled in behind me, and a woman got out who I had never met and recognized instantly, because she had his exact jaw.
"Constance Halloran," she said. "Connie. I'm his sister."
"He didn't send you."
"He'd sooner eat glass." She looked at the tub, and the two duffels, and the open tailgate. "Huh. Okafor said two weeks and I gave you four days. That's on me."
"Mrs. Halloran—"
"Connie."
"Connie. I'm not doing a scene tonight."
"Good," she said, "I hate a scene," and sat down on my tailgate like it was a bench in a park. "How long you been running?"
"I'm not running, I'm—"
"How long."
I stood there in a gravel driveway with my keys in my hand.
"Nineteen," I said. "I was nineteen the first time."
"What happened at nineteen?"
And I told her, which I did not plan to do.
My mother. Six years of it, in and out, the good stretches that were worse than the bad ones because you'd start to believe them.
A stepfather who was fine, actually, genuinely fine, and left anyway, because staying near her was a thing that cost more than people had.
The night I understood — actually understood, at nineteen, standing in a hallway — that if I stayed I would spend my entire life being the one holding the ladder.
So I went. And I kept going. And I got very, very good at going, and I built a whole profession out of it that pays well and needs doing and lets me be genuinely, provably useful to four hundred people a year, none of whom I will ever disappoint, because I am gone at week twelve.
Connie listened to the whole thing with her boots swinging.
"That was true," she said, when I finished.
"It is true."
"No. Was." She turned and looked at me. "You were nineteen and you were in a house that was going to eat you and you got out.
That was self-protection. That was the correct call and I'd have driven the truck.
" She tipped her chin at the duffels. "This isn't that.
This is a woman with a job she's good at and a man who'd lie down in traffic for her and a doctor who wants her gone, and she's packing his bags for him. "
"That's not—"
"Junie." Not unkind. Worse than unkind. "Your running's not protecting you from anything anymore. It's just a habit walking around in self-protection's jacket, and it's been wearing that jacket so long you've stopped checking whose it is."
The wind did the thing it does in that yard.
"He'll be fine," I said. "That's the — he'll be fine, Connie, that's the point, if I go now nobody has to—"
"He counted twelve feet across a kitchen and called it a win," she said.
"For six months. Nobody knew. Not me, not Judge, not one of those men.
" She stood up off the tailgate. "You want to know what he's like now?
He argues with me. He argues with me, about the propane, about my driving, about a movie.
He hasn't argued with me since the crash.
He agreed with everything I said for six months because agreeing is cheaper. "
I didn't say anything.
"Take the tub back in the house," Connie said. "Or don't. But do it because you decided, not because it's four days and your hands know the way."
Here's what Tank did.
I didn't find out for two days, and I didn't find out from him, because he never told me, and when I finally asked he said "Huh" and looked at the ceiling like a man being audited.
He drove to Elko. He went to the county recorder's office and then to the clinic's own public filings, which anybody can pull for eleven dollars, and he sat in a truck in a parking lot and read paperwork for four hours with reading glasses he owns and has never once let anybody see him wear.
Locum contracts are public in the way that anything a rural health district signs with state money is public.
So is the credentialing packet. And in the credentialing packet, in the box that says previous appointment and the box that says reason for separation, Theo Lindqvist had written two sentences that a person with a phone and a lot of patience could establish were not accurate.
Not a lie about medicine. A lie about a date and a title. Eleven months of employment written as twenty-six, and an interim department role that was never his, at a hospital in Wisconsin that was extremely willing to confirm both facts in writing to the credentialing officer who asked.
Tank didn't make that call. That's the part.
He drove the folder to Dr. Wendell Okafor's house on a Sunday and put it on the kitchen table and said, and I have this from Okafor verbatim, because Okafor enjoyed it enormously and has retold it eleven times:
"I'm not asking you to do anything with this. You're the one who signed his packet. Seemed like you'd want to know what you signed."
And then he left. He didn't ask for a thing. He didn't mention my name once, in an hour, in a kitchen, which Okafor noticed, and which Okafor said was the loudest hour he'd spent in a decade.
No fists. No leverage. Nothing anybody could ever hang on him, and nothing that could ever be described to a review board as a biker intimidating a physician — because all he'd done was hand a doctor eleven dollars' worth of public paper.
I got the whole story out of Okafor on a Tuesday and then I sat in my truck in the clinic lot for twenty minutes, next to a plastic tub I had still not carried back inside.
Then I carried it back inside.