Laugh (20 page)

“You coming to the clinic today?” Lacey’s voice was carefully neutral. The voice she used when her seven-year-old was being a little bastard. It was her
I am going to listen, but only this one time, so it better be good
voice.

“I have watering and weeding duty today at the plot by the library.”

This wasn’t what she wanted to hear, apparently, because suddenly, the quilt was yanked off his body, and not gently.

“Sam Burnside, get your ass out of bed and come with me, right now, to the clinic. I don’t even care if you get dressed. I don’t care if you speak. I don’t care if you do nothing but minimally maintain your vital signs, as long as you can sign your name and make some kind of signal for yes or no.”

“Why?” he asked. He was actually curious.

“Because I can’t do this myself.”

“But you are.”

He could hear her sit in the rocking chair in his room, so she must have shoved the clothes off it. It was his mom’s rocking chair, and she used to keep it in the hallway of their house when he was growing up. She called it the insomnia chair and kept a lamp on a table next to it, and the table was filled with books. He and PJ had shared a room, and Sarah and Des had shared another. Sometimes, in a big family, you just couldn’t sleep, especially Sam, especially his mom, too. The insomnia chair was a place to be comfortable without disturbing anyone, a place by yourself where places by yourself were at a premium.

The best times, though, were when he stepped out into the hallway, his mind racing, and his mom was in the rocker, the dim lamp making a little island of light at the end of the hall, her hair over her face while she read a book.

She’d look up and smile. Wave him closer. When he was still small, he’d curl up in her lap, and she’d
rock while he brushed one of her curls back and forth over his top lip. In the morning he never remembered how he had gotten back into his bed.

When he was older, she’d get up and they’d go downstairs together and eat a snack and talk. Or really, Sam’d talk, and his mom would lean over the counter and listen, or open the little swing-out window over the sink and smoke while Sam told her all of his troubles.

Sometimes, sometimes, it would already be so close to morning that she would put on a sweater or coat over her men’s-style pajamas and Sam would pull on shoes, and they’d go to the place that sold doughnuts by the middle school and get two big boxes for the family, and it’d be so early that they would have their pick of all the best ones—cream-filled, maple bars, bear claws, chocolate-iced with custard, powdered jelly.

Sam listened to the familiar creak of the chair while Lacey rocked in it and squeezed his eyes tighter against a burn.

“I don’t want to do it myself, Sam.”

“I should have never asked you.”

“I think I asked you.”

“I don’t remember. Do we have to talk about this right now?”

“We do. I doubt you want to talk about the other thing, and I won’t lecture, I promise. I just want to talk about the clinic, Sam. Just to talk about it. Because it’s something I like, and I feel as if I have to remind you that it’s something you like, too.”

He found himself
listening.

He’d met Nina at a time when he’d already been struggling with his place and his views on the clinic. The reasons he and Lacey had begun the work were starting to lack meaning. The more shifts he picked up at the hospital to avoid confronting Lacey about clinic work, the less connected he felt.

He was good at patients.

He had patients at the hospital, not at the clinic. At the clinic he only had problems and obstructions.

Nina had brought those problems into even more relief. Working in the fields, seeing her work, being with her, dividing up the time in the ER or at the urgent care—that was starting to feel good, feel better.

After his date with Nina, after not stopping to think, for a moment, for a minute—it reminded him how far he had to go. With himself. With Nina.

He heard Lacey adjust in the rocker. “It was last summer, when your dad was trying to recover from that resection to reduce the size of the tumor in his liver to give him a little pain relief. Kat Wells had covered a bunch of shifts for you so you could take care of your dad, so to give her a vacation, you went to Camelot to cover for her at the medical home low-income clinic she had opened there with her group.”

“I know.”

“Yeah, I do, too. You came back so excited. You loved the patients. You loved that it was one-stop for them—checkups, simple X-rays, prescriptions. Everyone knew everyone, you told me. There was better patient compliance on treatment because they trusted everyone, always saw the same people. You were burned out on the urgent care, how people from our own neighborhood were going there to get regular management for their blood pressure and stuff. You wanted to do for our neighborhood what Kat had done.”

“I was crazy, I think.”

“No, you weren’t. And if you were, I was, too. You took me to the diner, with that legal pad where you had written down that first crappy business plan after grilling Kat for what she said was hours. You knew I had been unhappy at the hospital for a while.”

Sam was struck by it suddenly.

How it had felt, working for Kat, working with Lacey early on.

There was something that felt like it had with Nina—something collaborative and personal that made every day expansive and
big.

It’s no wonder he proposed.

It was Nina, but it was also
him.
It was him on the verge of understanding what he needed and wanted. Lacey was quiet.

Sam pulled his knees to his chest and rolled to his side. Looked at Lacey, who was gazing into the middle distance.

She looked happy.

He wondered how much of her happiness had to do with him, what they were doing or had done. How she felt about all of this.

“You didn’t have any idea what you were talking about,” Lacey said, “but I could
see
it. I could see how it would really help people in this neighborhood. How much we needed something like that here. It wasn’t long before it didn’t matter if you knew what you were talking about, because I did. I went to the conference. I dragged you with me to meet with the regulators. You dragged me with you to look at real estate.”

“I’m fucking up, Lacey. The deeper we got, the less help I was. When I worked for Kat, I was there as a doctor, I saw patients. I didn’t think about the building and the equipment. I didn’t think about how you hire a scheduler. A nurse. A fucking cleaning service.”

“I know. But it doesn’t matter. I think about that stuff.”

“And I don’t think.”

“Look. Don’t make me go all come-to-Jesus, okay? I’m kind of tired of it, actually, when it comes to the Burnsides. You totally suck at administration, I’ll give you that. But you don’t suck at leadership. You’re a really good family doc, Sam. Plus, we read all those studies together, about how local providers have the best
outcomes with local people.”

The rocker creaked again.

“What happened?” she asked. “With Nina?”

“I’m not sure I want to talk about it.”

“That’s obvious. But you’ve been holed up here since Sunday, when I first started calling you. You wouldn’t even let Mike in on Monday. You’ve called off. But you’re telling me you’re going to go water for Nina?”

“For Paz Farms.”

“What happened?”

He rolled over on his back. He focused on a cobweb that stretched from the corner of the room to a blade of the ceiling fan. “I proposed.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah.”

“Marriage? You proposed marriage? To Nina?”

“Yeah.”

The creaking stopped. “What’d she say?”

“Fuck you, Lacey.” He didn’t mean it, though. He wasn’t angry.

“Right.” Lacey nudged the mattress. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. What kind of idiot proposes after one date?”

“You would’ve married Mishelle Mowry your sophomore year if you could’ve gotten it to take.”

He had to laugh. Possibly because Lacey was right.

“You even
told
everyone you were going to marry her.”

“I was a kid.”

“And then when she broke up with you after she went on that Kennedy history trip to Dallas and made out with John Stebbins on the bus, you locked yourself in the high school concession stand until your dad came with a bolt cutter.”

Sam heard another set of feet.

PJ.
Great.

“Are we playing This Is Sam’s Love Life? Because I was pretty fond of Mae Jin. When you were in med school. She was that art major who did the thing with beeswax painting.”

“Encaustic.”

“What?”

“The painting style was called encaustic. What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Where goes Lacey, so goes my nation.”

“And you’re giving me a hard time about
my
love life?”

“No, dude. I learned it from you. Except I might suggest a somewhat longer game.”

“Because that’s working so well for you?”

“Hey,” Lacey said. “I’m right fucking here.”

“Sorry,” said PJ, and Sam realized he really sounded sorry. He should ask him how he did that.

“And lovely to hear that you’re playing a game with me, by the way.”

“Shit, Lacey. I am not. I’m so totally not.”

Then the room went blissfully quiet while PJ suffered and Lacey was mad, or whatever she was.

“I’m sorry, Sam.” Lacey put her hand on his shoulder and he opened his eyes.

“I’m sorry I’ve blown off the clinic.”

“I know you are.”

“And that my brother’s such a creep.”

“It’s okay.”

“I’ll meet you there today.”

“That would be awesome, thank you.”

“After I do the thing at the plot.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“After we meet, will you take me to see Tay?”

Lacey squeezed his shoulder and ran her other hand through her crazy, messy hair. He’d actually tried to get her to date him a couple of times, once before she had Nathan, and once when Nathan was a baby.

She was pretty, smart, and had always been around the Burnside place. Of course, she had famously been PJ’s sitter, though until recently he hadn’t taken how PJ felt about her seriously. It would have been so easy if he could have fallen for Lacey.

If completely unfair to her in every way possible.

“Yeah, we’ll go see Tay, for sure.”

He sat up, squeezing his eyes shut against the wave of dizziness from being in bed for so long. PJ was sitting in the rocking chair now, looking depressed.

He was so stuck with these people, whether they understood him or not.

“Okay, you guys can get the fuck out now.”

PJ leaned back in the chair and crossed his long legs. He was wearing leather pants in the middle of summer,
fucking leather pants
, and a T-shirt that had such a deep V-neck Sam wondered why he was bothering to wear a shirt at all.

“Mike, too?” PJ asked, and let his sunglasses slide from his hair to the bridge of his nose.

“Mike’s here?”

“Yeah,” Lacey said, “he came in with me. He’s doing your laundry and took out your recycling.”

“Like an intervention,” PJ said.

“Jesus.” Sam rubbed his hands over his face.

“So Paul and I will be going,” Lacey said, “and text me when you’re coming in and we’ll get some stuff done, then we’ll go to the hospital for evening visitor’s hours.”

PJ stood up and hooked his arm through Lacey’s. Gave Sam a thumbs-up.

“Go.”

“We’re going, bro. Tomorrow night we’re getting pizza at Betty’s—Sarah, Lacey, Nathan, Betty, Daniel, and me to Skype with Des, just so you know.”

“Fine.”

“I’ll drag you there myself if you don’t show up. It’s early. Five o’clock.”

“Perfect.”

“Hefin will probably be there with her, too, so you’ll have to be nice.”

“The nicest. Get out of my bedroom.”

Lacey dragged PJ out.

“Sammy!”

Mike. With a basket of laundry.

“Shove over, Sammy, I need to fold your shorts.”

He watched Mike, with his thick, hairy arms, concentrate on folding underwear into neat piles, while whistling through his teeth.

“I messed up with Nina.”

“Figured.”

“I don’t know how to fix it.”

“Grovel, brush your knees off, repeat.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, even then it’s fifty-fifty.”

“Fuck!” Sam yelled at the ceiling. The cobweb fluttered.

“That’s about right, brother. So you’re gonna go water her plants?”

“Yeah.”

“Hoping to run into her, all casual-like?”

“Yeah.”

“Then hit the showers, you smell like death and look worse.”

“You’re seriously folding my underwear?” Sam heaved himself out of bed and snagged a towel from another basket of clean laundry he hadn’t noticed.

“You get yourself hitched up to the love of your life like I did, and you’ll be surprised at what you learn is civilized behavior.”

“I proposed.”

Mike stopped folding and whistled, low. “Shit. I guess I don’t blame you for trying to lock it in, but that was a high-casualty mission you assigned yourself.”

“I didn’t actually think much about it. It just—came out.”

“I thought we talked about that.”

“Yeah, but she …”

“I seriously do not want to hear how your little head contributed.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“I don’t know if groveling’s gonna work.”

“Me neither.”

“You’re a doctor. There’s not something you can give her to erase that particular moment in her memory?”

“Jesus, Mike.”

“You know what? I’ll ask my DeeDee what you should do. She’ll know.”

“Yeah?”

“She cuts hair for a living, man. She hears all kinds of weird shit people do. She’ll know.”

Sam went to go to the bathroom again, then stopped. “Everyone’s going to know, I guess.”

“Oh hell yes, they will. I’d run this like a campaign, if I were you.”

“I don’t want to. I just want this to be about Nina. About me and Nina.”

“Love’s not like that. Listen to the wisdom of a happily married slob. Love’s one of those things that’s only possible when you suddenly care that everyone else in the entire fucking world is happy. You see her, and something about her makes you want to do good, make people happy, hope that everyone you ever knew is happy, because you’re so goddamned happy that otherwise it’s not fair.”