Chapter Fourteen
Fourteen
“It’s like there’s some kind of secret language I don’t know,” Flo grumped in her second week at her new school. “There’s this one girl, Lainey Mullins, and she whispers every time I walk past.”
“Maybe she’s saying nice things about you?”
“Mom, you can’t even say that with a straight face.”
“Maybe sign up for extracurricular activities?” I suggested. “You might meet people that way?”
“I registered for cross country,” she told me a few days later, drumming her fingers on the car door as I drove us home.
“Great idea.”
“Okay,” she declared the following week, as she climbed in the car, muddy from running through fields.
“No luck at cross country. Do you think I should join the dance squad, try out for field hockey, join debate club, or audition for the school play? Where would I be most likely to find my people?” She held up a hand.
“And don’t say do all of them because there’s only so many hours in a day, and this school treats homework like it’s a way of life. I need some time off.”
I stole a glance at her. She looked like a mountaineer about to scale Everest, she was so grimly determined. “Ah… I’m not sure. Which would you prefer?”
“I think the problem with field hockey is that you spend so much time running and whacking the ball that you don’t get to talk to people, and dance squad has a stupid amount of sequins. So maybe debate club or the play?”
“What play are they doing?” I asked. Flo had never once shown any interest in drama, and I was dubious it would keep her occupied for long.
“Annie. It’s about some orphan kid.” She exuded irritation. “Look at what I’ve come to! It’s hard to make friends in Maine.”
Not for the first time, I was flooded with admiration for my kid.
My reaction to new schools and unfriendly kids had been the exact opposite of Flo’s.
I’d tried to make myself invisible, retreating to the corners of the library to read alone, leaving the school campus as soon as I could at the end of each day.
Flo had none of those instincts. She treated finding friends like a hill to be climbed, rather than a personal failing.
“I got a part in the play,” Flo told me in the final week of September, as she threw her backpack in the backseat of the car.
“That’s fantastic,” I said, hoping it was. I’d been nervous about her auditioning for a musical, since she’d never had a singing lesson in her life.
“Don’t get excited, it’s not a speaking part.”
“It’s not? Who are you playing?”
“You mean what am I playing,” she said, sighing.
“Oh…?”
“I’m Sandy,” she said in a long-suffering tone. “The dog.”
I tried not to laugh. “Oh. Well, at least you don’t need to memorize lines.”
“And Lainey Mullins got the part of Annie,” Florence groaned, closing her eyes and thudding the back of her head against the headrest. “So every time I’m on stage, I’m on stage with her.”
I cleared my throat. “Well, maybe you two can make friends during rehearsals.”
“She called me Fido, Mom. ‘Congratulations, Fido,’ she said, in front of everyone. I swear to God, if I didn’t like the school lunches here so much, I’d give up.
Do you know what we had today? Calzones.
I gave Chef Tonya a high five and told her she deserved a raise.
She said she’d settle for no more budget cuts. ”
“Well, that’s something.”
“You know, the only thing that makes me feel better about being Lainey Mullins’s dog is the fact that she has to wear this red curly wig that makes her look like Ronald McDonald. At least I’ll be in a dog suit, so no one will recognize me.”
“That is also something.”
Despite her slow start making friends, Flo seemed her usual garrulous and spirited self. “What about you?” she demanded. “How’s your friend situation? Have you made any at work?”
“Not a friend exactly, but a few friendly acquaintances.”
“I believe in you. You can take them from friendly to friends.”
“Thanks, Flo.”
“Cupcakes might help.”
“I’m not baking cupcakes.”
“You’re no fun.”
Everyone I worked with was nice enough and I didn’t think I’d need cupcakes to make friends. I just needed time. I’ve always been slow to get to know a person and that was just the way it was.
It turned out that Dr. Parker Nock and Dr. Maud Gerrish were married, and they had very different ideas on how the practice should be run.
Maud felt doctors should be like trusted family members, comforting and supportive; Parker felt they should be experts who should be listened to.
Maud wanted the waiting room to look homely and be filled with toys and fish tanks and posters of cats hanging from branches; Parker thought waiting rooms should be bare and quiet, with no nonsense.
“We find it hard to keep an office manager,” Shirleen, one of the medical assistants, sighed during my first week. “I’ve been here for five years, and they’ve been through three in that time. Not everyone can cope with umpiring their matches, if you know what I mean.”
Dr. Gerrish would order donuts for the breakroom and Dr. Nock would tell me donuts were the cause of many early deaths and to get a fruit basket instead.
Dr. Nock would put the call waiting music onto smooth jazz and Dr. Gerrish would change it to easy listening pop.
Dr. Gerrish would let the Girl Scouts sell cookies by the front door and Dr. Nock would then declare that the Junior Anglers should be able to sell raffle tickets too.
“Zoe, what the hell is that stoned-looking teddy bear out in the waiting room?” Dr. Nock complained in my second week. “Don’t you think it’s insensitive to the opioid addicts to have a stoned stuffy sitting out there?”
“Um, do you mean the Care Bear?” I hazarded. “That’s Sweet Serenity Bear, Dr. Nock.”
“This is a serious place, Zoe. People come here with actual problems. Do you think they want a stoned Care Bear goggling at them?”
“Um, no. I’ll move it out of the waiting room, Dr. Nock.”
“Don’t just move it. Get rid of it!”
When Dr. Gerrish found out that Sweet Serenity Bear was gone, she was anything but serene. “That bear keeps the little ones calm when they come for their shots!” she snapped.
“Yes, of course, Dr. Gerrish,” I said.
“You get online right now and order me a full set of plush Care Bears, thank you, Zoe. I want all the happy-looking ones. No Grumpy, you hear me, Zoe?”
“Yes, Dr. Gerrish.”
“Get Funshine and Love-a-Lot and Hopeful Heart. And I want another Sweet Serenity!”
“Oh, I didn’t throw her out, Dr. Gerrish.” I pulled the Care Bear from my desk drawer and held her up.
“Well, thank goodness for small miracles,” she exclaimed, snatching Sweet Serenity out of my hands. “I’m putting this right in front of that old grump’s door.” She paused, a gleam coming into her eye. “Actually, Zoe, go on and order a Grumpy Bear after all. I think I’ll put it on his desk.”
The first couple of weeks working there were stressful. I felt like I was being tossed back and forth like a hot potato. But after that, I relaxed into it and just let them bicker (flirt?) with each other. It seemed to be one of their love languages.
The work itself was more interesting than the glorified call center back in Pittsburgh.
I ran the accounts but also managed the practice, everything from staffing rosters to ordering supplies.
It was busy but smooth, with patterns to the week that soon felt oddly comforting.
Aside from Shirleen, there were a couple of nurses, and a few other medical assistants who handed out lollipops and stickers to children and adults alike.
During my lunch breaks, I read House Beautiful and Home Living (which were bountiful in the waiting room thanks to Dr. Nock, who didn’t believe in gossip magazines) and I scrolled reels about renovations for ideas for the house.
“What do you think of this?” I asked Shirleen, holding up a magazine spread, which showed a screened porch painted a moody shade of dark blue-green.
“Oh nice. You wouldn’t think a dark color like that would work, would you?” She shook her head, her bleached hair swinging stiffly. “Interior decorators are genius, aren’t they?”
“I got it into my head to paint my bedroom deep burgundy after reading one of those things,” admitted Carrie, another of the medical assistants.
She was reading one of the gossip magazines Dr. Gerrish had brought in, which we all hid from Dr. Nock.
“But my room doesn’t look anything like the pictures in the magazine.
I feel like I’m sleeping inside a womb.”
“Oh, Zoe, are you renovating?” Erica was currently knitting a winter coat for her daughter’s dog and peering over Carrie’s shoulder at the pictures of celebrities on the red carpet.
Shirleen laughed. “If you can call what Zoe’s doing renovating.” She gave me a look. “Go on, tell her,” she prodded.
I told her, preparing for the usual politely masked horror. But Erica surprised me.
“Oh my God, I love treasure houses!” Erica dropped her knitting needles in excitement. “I’ve never met someone who bought one in real life! Got photos?” Erica demanded.
“You know about treasure houses?” I sat up straighter.
“Do I! I’m obsessed. Obsessed. Are you making reels? What’s your Instagram?”
“Oh no, no Instagram.” I shut that down fast. I wasn’t posting anything where Tina might one day find it. I didn’t need her seeing photos of my house and my life and my kid. My life was strictly private. “I’ll show you photos on my phone, though.”
Erica made excited noises as I showed her images of our junk-filled rooms.
“And this is the porch you want to paint green?” she asked, as she zoomed in on the details of our currently screenless and stripped-bare porch. “And what’s that?”
She was looking at the other end of the porch.
“The, uh, laundry.” I had to laugh at the look on her face. “It’s in original condition,” I joked. “With vintage features.”
“Oh, dear God. Rip that off, honey. You could make one big, long lovely porch. It wouldn’t take much to take down that corrugated iron and put up frames for screens instead. Wouldn’t it be a big space then? Forget that dark green, though, stained timber would be nicer.”
“I like this white porch here,” Carrie said, pointing at another page in the magazine. “It’s got Kennedy compound written all over it.”
“I don’t think I’m the Kennedy compound type,” I said dubiously, staring down at the nautical white indoor/outdoor room.
“Well, what type are you?”
I thought about it. “I don’t know.”
“Whatever you do, keep it simple.” I jumped a mile as I realized Dr. Nock was standing behind me, staring down at the photo on my phone.
“The focus is supposed to be on the view, not the room,” he said. “Looks like a nice big garden.” He took an apple from the fruit basket on the table and wandered off again.
He was right, I realized, as I went back to the magazine. The reason I was drawn to the page with the blue-green room wasn’t the color of the paint, it was the way the woods glowed beyond the frames of the screens.
“What kind of flooring have you got?” Erica asked, finishing off the dog coat.
“Floorboards on the porch side, brick on the laundry side.”
“Do you want to keep it like that or change both to brick or both to boards?”
“I don’t know.” I sighed explosively. “There are too many decisions to make. And I don’t know what kind of person I am,” I said plaintively. How could I be over thirty and not know what kind of person I was, whether or not I was a Kennedy compound type, or even if I preferred bricks to boards?
“Do as little as possible,” Dr. Nock advised as he returned to fill his coffee mug. “Old houses are not to be messed with. Buff them up and smooth off the edges and then leave them be.”
I’d said something similar to Jake, I remembered, about letting houses be what they were. “But don’t you think it’ll look odd if half the floor is brick and half is board?”
“Do you?” His gray eyes were clear and uncompromising.
“No,” I blurted.
“Well, there you go.” And off he went again.
“Girls?” Tam, the last of the receptionists, who was managing the desk while we lunched, stuck her head into our little kitchen/common room. “I’ve got an emergency!”
The mood shifted, everyone alert.
“Oh, not that kind of emergency. It’s just about this evening’s NA meeting. My mother’s had a bit of an episode in the home, but I’m supposed to be here to help Dr. Nock tonight. Can someone sit in for me? It’s just doing the coffee and snacks and tidying up after.”
“Ah, honey, I can’t. I’m babysitting tonight.” Erica was regretful.
“I’ve got friends coming over to rewatch the Anthony season of Bridgerton,” Carrie said, not sounding regretful in the slightest.
“Sorry, Tam, it’s Zumba night.” Shirleen did a shimmy.
Tam looked increasingly tense.
“I might be able to do it,” I said tentatively, even though the mention of Narcotics Anonymous made my stomach clench.
“I just need to check my planner to see what time I have to get Flo. I haven’t got our schedule memorized yet.
” Tam followed me to my desk, all but wringing her hands.
“What time is the meeting?” I asked as I skimmed the week.
“Six till seven-thirty.”
Flo had her first rehearsal for the play from five to eight. She hadn’t been thrilled to hear she’d be at school that late and had suggested we get burgers for dinner on the way home. I suggested she get excited about the leftovers in the fridge.
“I can do it,” I told Tam, who sagged with relief. I tried to ignore the sweaty feeling I had at the thought of the meeting itself.
“Oh, thank you so much.” She started packing up. “I could have left Dr. Nock to do it by himself, but he never locks up properly…”
“All I have to do is coffee?”
“And put out snacks. He has a bag of apples over there—but I usually put out the rest of the donuts too. Oh, and tissues. You’ll need tissues out. And then tidy and lock up after. Thank you, you’re a godsend.”
“I hope your mom is okay.”
She teared up. “Thanks, Zoe.”