A Home for the M.D.. GINA WILKINS

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      She was delighted that Alice had been knitting for almost a year. Alice had begged Jacqui to teach her last summer and she’d gotten quite good at it since. Jacqui enjoyed sharing her knowledge, the way that nice neighbor had done with her all those years ago. Alice liked knitting soft little stuffed animals in pastel yarns, which she then donated to the local children’s hospital. The same hospital where her uncle Mitch worked, Jacqui thought, glancing at the pediatric orthopedic surgeon on the couch.

      “Everything on TV is boring, Uncle Mitch. You want to play a game?” Alice asked hopefully.

      “Sure, that sounds like fun,” he said, looking as if he meant it. “What have you got?”

      She jumped up eagerly and retrieved a stack of games from a cabinet under a built-in bookcase, setting them on the well-used game table in one corner of the comfortable family room. Generally eschewing the video games most kids her age loved, Alice was instead a fiend for board games, nagging anyone available into playing with her. Jacqui was roped into games fairly often, especially with Alice out of school for the summer.

      Alice and Mitch selected a game, sat at the table and then both looked expectantly toward Jacqui.

      “Can I get you anything to drink during your game?” she asked, motioning with her knitting toward the doorway.

      “Come play with us, Jacqui,” Alice urged, patting an empty chair at the table.

      “Oh, I—”

      Alice gave her a pleading, puppy-dog-eyes look that would have put Waldo to shame. “Please. Games are more fun with three.”

      “I wonder if I should resent that,” Mitch mused aloud.

      Both women ignored him. Conceding to Alice’s expression, Jacqui set aside her project. “All right. But just for a little while.”

      Two hours later, they still sat around the game table. Empty soda cans sat beside Alice and Mitch, and Jacqui had just finished her second cup of hot tea. Crumbs were the only thing remaining on the plate of cookies Jacqui had brought out earlier. Scribbled score pads documented individual victories in the games they’d played that evening.

      She was startled to realize how much time had passed when she glanced at the clock on the mantel. Those two hours had flown by in a blur of rolling dice and laughter. Mitch and Alice were cute together. A stranger observing them would never have believed they’d known each other only a little longer than a year, that Mitch had not known his niece-by-marriage all her life. He teased her and chatted with her with an ease that proclaimed family bonds. At least the type of family bonds Jacqui had observed while working in this household. Not so much in her own.

      How might her life have been different, she wondered idly, if her own family had spent time around a table, laughing over a board game? Or even just chatting over dinner? How might she have been different?

      A memory popped into her head, dimming her smile. She and Olivia sat cross-legged on the floor of a cheap motel room, playing Monopoly with a battered, salvaged set. They’d replaced the missing game tokens with different-colored pebbles and had made their own deeds and play money with scraps of paper. They’d had a few little plastic houses and hotels and enough instruction cards to make it possible for them to play. She’d been maybe twelve at the time, which would have made Olivia ten.

      She remembered the wistfulness in Olivia’s smile when she’d earned enough scrap-paper money to buy a house.

      “Don’t you wish it was real?” Olivia had asked, studying the little green plastic house in her hand. “Don’t you wish we could really buy a house and live in it forever?”

      “Not likely,” Jacqui had answered with a brusqueness designed to hide her own old longings. “Dad would be ready to move on before we even mowed the grass the first time.”

      “I’d like to mow grass.” Olivia set the little plastic house carefully into position on the game board. “When I grow up, I’m going to have a house with a big yard and I’ll mow the grass and plant flowers. Maybe I’ll have a garden and grow peaches. I love peaches.”

      “You don’t grow peaches in a garden. You grow them in an orchard,” Jacqui had corrected with the wisdom of her additional two years.

      “Then I’ll have an orchard,” Olivia had replied, unperturbed.

      Jacqui snapped back into the present when Alice demanded her attention.

      “Let’s play Monopoly now!” the teen suggested with an eager look at the stack of games they hadn’t already played.

      Because there were only a few games left in that stack, Jacqui found no particular significance in Alice’s choice, despite the coincidence. Still, her throat clenched enough that she had to clear it silently before replying. “That’s all for me tonight, Alice. It’s getting late, and I have a few things to do before bedtime.”

      Alice sighed, but didn’t argue, to Jacqui’s relief. When Mitch announced that he had early hospital rounds to make the next morning, Alice accepted that game night was over and began to put away the supplies.

      Mitch helped Jacqui clear away the remains of their snacks. Carrying empty soda cans to the recycling bin in the kitchen, he smiled down at her when they almost bumped into each other as he reached around her to drop the cans in the bin. “Sorry.”

      This usually roomy kitchen had never felt as small as it did at that moment, with Mitch standing right in front of her and the kitchen counter at her back. All she’d have to do was take one small step forward and she’d be in his arms, plastered against him. Not that she intended to do anything of the sort, of course. It was strictly an observation.

      Mitch studied her face for a moment, making her wonder what he might see in the expression she tried to keep carefully blank. And then he moved back a few steps. She drew in air, realizing she’d held her breath while he stood so close. What was it about this man that flustered her so much?

      He moved toward the doorway. “I’m going to do some paperwork in my room, then turn in. I need to be at the hospital by six in the morning for a breakfast meeting with a partner. Told my mom I’d have lunch with her and Madison and our aunts, then I’m heading to the mall to buy a few things. Tomorrow evening I’ll be playing soccer with the guys, so I won’t be around here much.”

      She nodded, telling herself she should be relieved he wouldn’t be underfoot the next day.

      “Good night, Jacqui.”

      “Good night.” He didn’t seem to like it when she called him Dr. Baker, but she wasn’t quite comfortable using his name yet, so she tended to avoid calling him anything.

      He didn’t look back when he left the room. She knew that because she watched him until he was out of her sight.

      Two more weeks, max, under the same roof. She could do this. She assumed the novelty of him would wear off after a couple days of proximity. At least she hoped it would. She wasn’t sure how much she could take of having her pulse race this way every time Mitch stood close to her.

      As he climbed into the guest bed that night, Mitch wondered what it was about a suggestion of playing Monopoly that had made Jacqui’s dark eyes go so bleak it had made his heart hurt for her. The most obvious explanation was that it had something to do with her late sister. СКАЧАТЬ