Small-Town Midwife. Jean Gordon C.

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СКАЧАТЬ flickered in his eyes that she would have normally read as pain. But that didn’t make any sense.

      “Even a seemingly normal birth can have complications.”

      Jon wasn’t saying anything she didn’t already know well. But most of their births didn’t need the type of intervention he was talking about. “We continually screen our mothers and insist on a center delivery when we think one is needed, or refer the mother to an obstetrician if we see anything abnormal that might require medical intervention or a hospital delivery.”

      “And when something goes wrong at home?” Jon asked.

      “With our screening, that hasn’t been a common experience.” Her only life-threatening complication had occurred here at the center.

      “You’re saying that you’ve never had to rush a home-birth mother to the hospital?” he pressed.

      Autumn silently counted to three. “We’ve had to transport a couple of laboring home-birth mothers to the birthing center.”

      He crossed his arms and nodded, as if her answer had proved some point.

      Uneasiness washed over her. As director, Dr. Hanlon could initiate a review of her and Kelly’s privileges here at the birthing center if he had a problem with their practice. The next closest medical facility, where they also had privileges, was an hour away at the Adirondack Medical Center in Saranac Lake. Autumn shook the feeling off. She was being paranoid. The center needed Kelly and her. The community needed them.

      “We should get back to Saranac.” Liza glanced from Jon to Autumn. “We have a dinner meeting with the board of directors of the hospital.”

      “Of course.” Jon turned to Autumn. “I’ll set up a staff meeting for early next week and email you and your partner an invitation.”

      “The front office assistant has our patient schedule.” No need to tell him she worked with Kelly under contract. He’d find out soon enough that she wasn’t a partner.

      “Good. I’ll check with the office assistant.” He took a step to follow Liza, who was already at the doorway, and stopped. His all-business expression softened. “You wouldn’t by any chance be related to Neal Hazard at the campgrounds over on Paradox Lake?”

      “Yes, he’s my father. Why?” Autumn couldn’t imagine any way Jon would know her father.

      “I’m renting his duplex.”

      “The one on Hazard Cove Road?” He couldn’t mean any other. It was the only duplex Dad owned. She’d assumed he was renting it to one of the usual families who took it for the summer.

      “That’s the one. I’ll see you next week.”

      “Right.”

      Once he was out of sight, Autumn leaned against the edge of her desk. Dr. Hanlon was going to be her next-door neighbor. She could put her feelings about him and the thoughtless way he’d broken her Samaritan Hospital roommate’s heart behind her at work. She and Kelly practiced independently of the birthing center administration. And since she’d taken leave from delivering babies, she was unlikely to have any need to consult with him as the practice’s backup physician. If she made an effort, she could pretty much avoid him here.

      But with him living right next door, avoiding him and keeping her dislike in check wouldn’t be so easy. While she hadn’t been bowled over by him like so many of the nurses, she’d liked Jon when she’d first met him and had half expected him to ask her out. But he’d asked out her roommate, Kate, instead. Then, after he’d broken up with Kate, he’d had the audacity to ask her out. And he’d seemed mystified when she’d turned him down. It hadn’t taken him long to move on to another nurse friend, confirming the buzz around Samaritan that he wasn’t the settling-down type. And while it might seem old-fashioned, she was.

      Autumn pushed away from the desk, knocking a coffee mug of pens off the edge. Considering his reputation with women, he probably didn’t remember any of it. But she did.

      * * *

      Jon unlocked the door and stepped into the front hall of the bed-and-breakfast in Crown Point where he was staying. He stretched the kinks out of his back as he climbed the stairs. What had been a pleasant hour’s drive from Ticonderoga to Saranac Lake in the bright summer evening hours had seemed interminable on the drive back in the dark. The distances people here in the Adirondacks had to travel for medical care were unbelievable compared to what he was used to downstate. And Liza had told him that Autumn and her partner’s practice served a large part of the sixty-mile distance between the birthing center and the hospital in Saranac, as well as some of the areas south of Ticonderoga.

      He let himself into his room. Liza’s comment had kept Autumn in his mind as he wound his way back to Crown Point. Thoughts of her traveling the steep narrow side roads he’d passed to deliver babies in homes set up on the mountainside alternated with visions of Autumn this afternoon, her delicate-featured face framed by wisps of flaxen hair escaping the silver clip that pinned the rest up.

      As he slipped off his suit coat, he noticed the message light flashing on the phone. He was tempted to ignore it. Morning would be here all too soon, and he had to be up to meet the moving van at the duplex at eight. That’s it. It could be the movers. He’d given the number here at the bed-and-breakfast as an alternate number where he could be reached.

      Jon lifted the receiver and pressed the message button.

      “Jay.” His grandfather used the family nickname he’d dropped in middle school. “It’s your grandfather. I’ll be upstate next week, and your grandmother insists on coming with me and having dinner with you. I’ve made reservations for Wednesday at six-thirty at the Sagamore in Lake George.”

      The message clicked off with no goodbye. Typical of Grandfather. Bark an order and leave, fully expecting it to be obeyed without question. Jon dropped the receiver back in place. He should ignore it. Nothing he did pleased his family anyway. But he couldn’t do that to Nana. Not after all she’d done for him. She’d provided the love his career-and stature-driven parents hadn’t. She’d grieved and prayed with him when Angela, his favorite cousin and close friend, had died in childbirth in Haiti, where she’d been serving at a mission.

      His parents’ brief acknowledgment of his sorrow had been tinged with an undercurrent that it was punishment for Angie having conceived before she and her fiancé had married. Angie had gone through a wild period at college. But after she and her fiancé had learned of the baby, they’d both reembraced the Christian faith they’d been raised with.

      Jon jerked off his loosened tie. Despite what the family might think, Angie and Brad’s Haitian missionary work after they married had been more than enough to atone for their indiscretion. Angie hadn’t had to... His throat clogged. Jon was finding it harder and harder to accept the tenet of a vengeful God that he’d been raised with in his parents’ church. His thoughts went to Brad, now raising their little boy alone, and how Brad’s faith in a loving Savior had given him strength. Jon had had only anger that grew into a need, a calling, to use his medical training and technology to do everything he could to protect other women, families, from the same tragedy.

      The directorship of the Ticonderoga Birthing Center was the perfect first step toward doing just that—maybe even more so now that he’d learned about some of the center’s current practices. In his opinion, home births weren’t something to be encouraged. СКАЧАТЬ