Back to McGuffey's. Liz Flaherty

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       CHAPTER THREE

      “I DON’T KNOW,” he said quietly, as they sat across from each other at the Bagel Stop. “I don’t know why I came back.”

      Kate asked a legitimate question, one Ben wished he had a definitive answer to. He’d thought about it over and over in the two weeks since they’d gotten the news. He’d talked to his father about it only a few nights before.

      “Sometimes I hate medicine,” he’d said, washing and rinsing glasses.

      “Aye.” Tim slid the stemware onto its racks and cast a surveying glance around the room, crowded with patrons eating Maeve’s Thursday night special. He leaned against the back counter, something he’d have reprimanded one of his children for. The change in the senior McGuffey, the visible weakening, made Ben clamp his teeth down on his bottom lip to keep from protesting aloud.

      His father, a full four inches shorter and forty pounds lighter than any of his sons, laughed, a deep infectious sound that had lost none of its charm with his diminishing health. “Sometimes I think if one more person gets belligerent about the taking of his car keys, I’ll throw up my hands and let him go off and kill himself. But the truth is, he’d probably kill someone else and I’d never get over it.” He shrugged. “It’s what I do, and most days I like it much more than I don’t.”

      Ben liked being a doctor, too. As his father put it, most days. He liked being able to heal, laughing with young patients, sympathizing with old ones. He liked studying and learning new things on nearly a daily basis. But he didn’t like insurance companies and the endless threat of lawsuits and having his own space in the professional building parking lot.

      He thought that in particular was stupid. When one of the women who worked in their office had reached the basketball-out-front stage of her pregnancy, he’d urged her to use his parking place. She’d given him an incredulous look and said, “What, you want me to gain another twenty pounds? Waddling across the lot is the only real exercise I’m getting these days.”

      Her laughing remark had made Ben consider his own fitness—or lack thereof. He’d grown up skiing, playing basketball and hiking, and while there were plenty of places in Massachusetts he could do all that, he didn’t really want to anymore. So he did cardio a couple of times a week in the rehab unit at the hospital, working up a sweat and wondering why he wasn’t happy. Sometimes, after a couple of beers on the golf course with old friends, he came close, but that only worked on the links-style course in the shadow of Wish Mountain just outside Fionnegan.

      But most of what he didn’t like was centered on a single epiphanous life event, the one that had brought him back to Fionnegan.

      His father’s diagnosis.

      Tim McGuffey had come to America from Ireland at the age of seventeen. He’d worked as a waiter for five years until the County Mayo girl he loved could join him, then stepped behind the bar and never stepped out again. He and Maeve had bought the pub at the bottom of Wish Mountain when Morgan was little more than a baby. They worked sixteen-hour days and taught their children to dance, how to pour the best pints in the Northeast Kingdom and that Sunday mornings were for church, not sleeping late.

      They emphasized to their brood of little McGuffeys that the good life was to be gained by hard work, education and the love of an equal partner. Although everyone paid their parents back the money spent on their educations, Ben never forgot that Tim wore the same suit to Morgan’s commencement from grad school that he’d worn when Patrick graduated from eighth grade. “It’s my graduation, wedding and funeral suit,” he’d said when Ben protested. He’d brushed the too-wide lapels, his eyes twinkling the way they always did. “Any day now, it’s going to be back in style. And aren’t СКАЧАТЬ