Small-Town Midwife. Jean Gordon C.

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      In two long strides, Jon was beside her on the walkway in front of her door.

      “If you need a refill, I made plenty.” Not exactly the way to discourage him from hanging around. She glanced at Jon out of the corner of her eye. But he was so right there. She’d needed to say something.

      “That’d be great.”

      “Go ahead and I’ll bring the pot out.” What had gotten into her? Now she was offering to wait on him. Did her unsettled job situation have her so off-kilter that she’d grasp at anything that made her feel useful?

      Once Jon rounded the corner of the house to the patio, Autumn yanked her door open and stomped across her living room. She poured a couple of dollops of fat-free half-and-half in her cup, picked up the coffeepot and walked out to the patio as the calm, sane person she usually was.

      Jon stood at the far edge of the patio looking up at the roof. “I didn’t notice the solar panels when the Realtor showed me the place. Photovoltaic?”

      “Yes. Dad put the system in last summer when he and Grandpa decided to divide the house into a two-family.” Autumn placed the coffeepot and her mug on the round wooden table.

      “By himself?” Jon’s voice held a note of awe.

      “More or less. It’s what he does.” Autumn sat on the circular bench and topped up her drink. While she knew her father’s limitations, growing up as the only child of a teenage single father, she’d never completely outgrown her feeling that “Daddy could do anything” and was often surprised when people commented on his work.

      Jon joined her and refilled his mug. “He owns a solar energy company or a construction company?”

      For some reason, Jon’s assumption that her father owned a company rankled. “Neither. He’s a self-employed electrician, but he does hookups for several companies throughout the Northeast. It’s Anne, my stepmother, who’s the corporate tycoon of the family. She’s the chair of the board of directors of GreenSpaces and heads the environmental studies program at the college in Ticonderoga.”

      Autumn sipped her coffee while she waited for the name of Anne’s international environmental engineering company to register with Jon and tried to figure out what she was doing. She didn’t have to prove anything to Jon just because he came from a prominent old-money family.

      He looked at her blankly over the edge of his coffee mug. “That’s the community college I passed on State Route 74?”

      Her coffee tasted bitter in her mouth. She should have brought the honey out. “Yes, North Country Community College. That’s where I got my RN degree.”

      “You didn’t go away to school? I couldn’t wait to leave.”

      “I had an academic scholarship to Trinity College in Chicago. My other grandfather was a professor there. But I just wasn’t ready to leave home yet then. I never knew my mother, and I’m not that close to him and my grandmother.” She clamped her forefinger over her mouth. He didn’t need—or, probably, want—her family history, particularly since he wasn’t sharing any of his.

      Jon ran his gaze over the weathered shake siding of the house behind her, pausing at the drooping gutter knocked loose from the windstorm the week before last.

      She glanced from the gutter to Jon and pressed her lips together. With his work getting the cabins ready for Camp Sonrise to open, Grandpa hadn’t had a chance to repair the gutter. “A lot of the kids I went to high school with couldn’t wait to leave, but I like it here at Paradox Lake. And it was a kick going to college with Dad. His electrician business had fallen off while he was serving in Afghanistan with the National Guard, so he took some environmental studies courses at NCCC while I was there. That’s how he met Anne.”

      A warm gust of wind from the lake blew the gutter against the house with a thud, drawing Jon’s gaze back to it.

      Did he think it was going to fall on them? Or that Dad couldn’t afford to hire someone to repair the gutter, hadn’t had the money for her to go away to a big school? Autumn glanced from her empty mug to his newly refilled one to the drained coffeepot and wished she’d just given him his coffee and gone back inside to have hers.

      No. She was being ridiculous, letting Jon push buttons she didn’t even know she had. Maybe she hadn’t had the privileged childhood that Jon must have, but she and Dad had done okay. She’d had as much as her friends.

      He broke the silence. “It is beautiful up here. Relaxing. I can see why you came back after you finished your clinicals at Samaritan for your certification.”

      “That and family. We’re close. And there’s a need here for midwives, for almost any medical practitioner.”

      “True. The area is underserved.”

      “So that’s what brought you up here?”

      “Partly. But more the opportunity.”

      His reply jarred her. She’d thought she’d hit on something they had in common: a professional desire to serve where their skills were needed.

      “There aren’t a lot of places where someone my age can get the level of administrative experience that Adirondack Medical Center is offering me at the birthing center.”

      Maybe Jon had more in common with their last director than she’d thought yesterday. The center’s former director had leveraged his experience at the birthing center into a cushy administrative position at a big medical center downstate.

      Autumn shifted her weight on the bench. Jon could be grooming himself to take over his grandfather’s health-care corporation. The strains of a hit song by the local Christian country band Resurrection Light broke the growing silence.

      “Excuse me.” Jon pulled his cell phone from his pocket. His face lit when he saw the caller ID.

      She pushed the bench back, ready to give him some privacy.

      “Nana.” Jon waved Autumn down as she started to rise. “Yes, we’re on for dinner. I got the message.” He frowned. “You don’t have to apologize. See you then.” He hunkered down over the phone. “Love you, too.”

      He shoved the phone back in his pocket. “My grandparents are going to be in Lake George Tuesday.”

      “Are they here on vacation?” Autumn remembered Liza, the medical center administrator, saying something yesterday about his grandparents vacationing in Lake George.

      “No,” he said brusquely. “Grandfather is coming up for a business meeting near Syracuse.”

      “Do you see them often?” After she’d babbled on about her family, it was only fair that he take his turn.

      “No.”

      “Oh, I thought they might have lived near you. When you said coming up I assumed you meant from the New York City, Westchester area.”

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