FATHER’S DAY SHOULD be outlawed.
Or at least the giving of gifts involving any type of motor should be banned. So far that afternoon, Jessi had treated a leg that been kissed by a chain saw, a back injury from an ATV accident and a lawn mower that had collided with a lamppost before bouncing back and knocking its new owner unconscious. Not to mention assorted other minor injuries. And she still had two hours to go until the end of her shift. The one thing she hadn’t seen had been the screen on her cell phone lighting up or feeling its vibration coming from the pocket of her scrubs.
All was silent with Clint and her daughter.
Sighing, she grabbed the next chart and headed for the curtained exam room. Patient name: William Tuppele. Complaint: the words fishing hook and earlobe ran through her head before she blinked and forced her eyes to read back over that part.
Okay. So it wasn’t just things with motors that should be banned from this particular holiday.
When she entered the room, a man dressed in hip waders with a camo T-shirt tucked into them sat on the exam table. And, yep, he was sporting a shiny new piece of jewelry.
She looked closer and gulped. Had something behind his ear just moved?
Stepping farther in the room, she glanced again at his chart. “Mr. Tuppele.” She omitted the words How are you? because it was pretty obvious this was the last place the man wanted to be. Instead, she aimed for cheeky. “Catch anything interesting today?”
Instead of smiling, the man scowled. “Great, I get a nurse who thinks she’s a comedienne.”
She bristled, but held out her hand anyway. “I’m Dr. Riley. How long have you been like this?”
“About an hour.” His gaze skipped away from hers, his words slurring the slightest bit. “My son caught me with his hook. It was his first fishing trip.”
“Hmm.” She kept the sound as noncommittal as possible, but from the way his face had turned scarlet and—she tried not to fan herself openly—the alcohol fumes that bathed every word the man spoke, she would almost bet there was no “son” involved in this particular party. Rather, she suspected a male-bonding episode that had gone terribly wrong.
Hip waders and booze. Not a good combination. They were lucky no one had drowned. “Did someone drive you to the hospital?”
She certainly didn’t want to let a drunk loose on the roads.
“One of my buddies. He’s down in the waiting room.”
Jessi could only hope the buddy had been less generous when it came to doling out those cans of beer to himself. She made a mental note to have someone check on his friend’s sobriety level.
She sat on her stool just as the worm—and, yes, it was indeed a piece of live bait—gave a couple of frantic wiggles. Lord, she did not want to touch that thing, much less have to handle it. But the best way to remove a fishing hook was to cut off the end opposite the barb and push the shank on through, rather than risk more damage by pulling it back out the way it had gone in. That barb acted like a one-way door. They went in, but they didn’t want to come out.
The worm moved again.
“Hell,” said the man. “Can you please get this damned thing off me? It stinks.”
And it’s creeping me out.
Mr. Tuppele didn’t say the words, but she could well imagine him thinking them, because the same thoughts were circling around in her head, too. Maybe this was the worm’s way of exacting revenge on anglers everywhere.
And maybe she could call one of the male nurses.
Ha! And give her patient a reason for his earlier sexist remark. Hardly. “When was your last tetanus shot?”
“Haven’t been to a doctor in twenty years. Wouldn’t be here now if one of my…er, my son hadn’t been so squeamish about taking it out himself. “Is my ear going to be permanently pierced? I don’t cotton to men with earrings and such.”
She smiled despite herself, tempted to match his it-was-my-son fib and tell him that, yes, he would be permanently disfigured and might as well go out and buy a couple of nice dangly pieces of jewelry. But she restrained herself. “No. I knew a man who had his ear pierced in high school but had to stop wearing an earring when he went into the military. It’s all healed up now.”
At least she assumed that’s when Clint had stopped wearing the single hoop in his ear, because there was no sign of it now. And how was it that she had even noticed that? Or remembered what he’d worn back then?
She’d kind of liked his earring, back in the day.
“Good. Don’t need anyone getting any strange ideas about me.”
Too late for that, Mr. Tuppele. She already had a few ideas about him. And they went much deeper than men sporting earrings. “Let me set up. I’m going to call in a nurse to give you a shot to numb your ear.”
“I don’t need it numbed. I just need that damned thing out.”
“Are you sure?” The rest of the staff was going to thank her patient for sparing them the need to get close to that wriggler.
“Just do it.”
“Okay.” Trying not to shudder, she got her equipment together, praying the worm died before she had to deal with it. As disgusting as she found it, she felt a twinge of pity for the creature. It hadn’t been its choice to be cast into a river for the first hungry fish to gulp.
Gloves in place, she squirted some alcohol on the wound in back of his ear, waiting for the string of cuss words to die down before continuing. She grabbed her locking forceps and clamped the instrument right behind the worm. If the barb had gone all the way through his ear, she could have just cut it off and backed the hook out, worm and all. But while there was a tiny bit of metal showing in the front of the lobe, the barb was still embedded in the man’s flesh. It was going to hurt, pushing it the rest of the way through. She got a pair of wire cutters and took a deep breath, then moved in and cut the eye, leaving as much shank as possible behind that worm.
“Okay, I’m going to have to push the barb through the front, are you sure you’re okay?”
“Fine.”
Holding the front of the man’s earlobe with her gloved fingers, she used the forceps to push hard, until the barb popped through.
The man yelled out a few more choice words, but he’d held remarkably steady. Having a hook shoved through your ear was evidently a surefire way to sober up. Fast.
“All right, the worst part is over. I just need to pull the hook the rest of the way out.” Holding a tray beneath his ear so she wouldn’t have to touch the worm, she removed the forceps and used them to grasp the barb in front. Then she pulled steadily, until the worm plonked onto the instrument tray and the hook was the rest of the way through his ear.
Praying the creature didn’t find his way off the counter and onto the floor, she set the tray down and used a piece of antiseptic soaked gauze to sponge away the blood and dirt from the front and the back of the man’s ear and then took a piece of dry gauze and applied pressure to stop the bleeding. “Can you hold this here? We’ll need to get you a tetanus shot as well as some antibiotics, just in case.”
Mr. Tuppele did as she asked and squeezed his earlobe between the two sides of gauze. But when she carried the worm over to the garbage can, the man stopped her with a yelled “Hey!”
She turned toward him, still holding the tray. “Yes?”
“That thing dead?”
She glanced down. It wasn’t moving any more, thank God. “I think so.”
“Touch it to make sure.”
Horror filled her to the core. She hated fishing. Hated bugs. Broken bones, bullet wounds, she could whiz through with ease, but anything that wiggled or crawled or stared with cold-blooded eyes she was just not into. “I’ll let you do the honors.” She held out the tray and let the man jab the worm with a finger while she cringed. Thankfully it remained limp, even after two more pokes.
“Damn. I was hoping to use that one again.”
Again? Hooking himself once hadn’t been enough?
She gave a mental eye roll. “Sorry about that. It was probably the alcohol.”
“There ain’t that much in my blood.”
Dumping the worm and the cleaning gauze into the trash bin, she turned back to face him. “I’ll have the nurse come in with the shot and your prescription. Make sure you see your doctor if that ear puffs up or doesn’t seem to be healing after a couple of days. Or if you develop a fever.”
She took the gauze from him and checked his ear, before pressing tiny round bandages over the front and back of the puncture wound. “You can take those off in a couple of hours.”
The man managed to mumble out a “Thank you.”
Her phone buzzed, making her jump.
Clint. It had to be.
Patting the man on the back and telling him to take care, she went out and gave instructions to the nurse and asked her to send someone out to check on his buddy. By that time her phone had stopped ringing. “Anyone else waiting for me?”
The nurse grinned. “Not at the moment. But the new barbecue grills are probably being fired up even as we speak.”
“Heaven help us all.”
Hopefully, that wave of patients would come through after she was off duty. She forced out a laugh, even though she was dying to grab her phone and call Clint back. He knew she was on duty. Knew she’d get back to him as soon as she could.
The nurse got the injection ready and carried it into the room, leaving Jessi alone in the hallway. She took out her phone and glanced at the readout, even though she knew who it was.
C. Marks.
Hitting the redial button, she leaned a shoulder against the wall, an ache settling in her back at all the bending she’d done today.
“Marks here.”
“Clint? It’s Jessi. What’s up?”
“Just calling to see how much longer you were on duty.”
Jessi glanced at her watch. “I have another half hour, why?”
“I thought we might get together and talk about Chelsea.”
“Is something wrong?”
“No, she’s fine. No major developments, but no setbacks either. I just haven’t eaten, and I assume you haven’t either. Would you like to go somewhere? Or I could come to the hospital and eat with you in the cafeteria.”
She grimaced, glancing at the room she’d just come from. “No. The food here isn’t the best, and I’m not really hungry. I could do with a shake, though, while you get something else.”
She was still puzzling over his sudden change of heart.
“A shake sounds fine. How about we get it to go?”
Okay, she hadn’t thought this far ahead. “And go where?”
“We could go to the park on the east side.”
The park? She glanced out at the streetlights that were already visible in the darkening sky. “Sounds like a plan.”
“Good. I’ll meet you at the front entrance of the hospital, okay?”
“I’ll be there.”
Maybe somehow in that period of time she could shake off all thoughts of sitting inside Clint’s car in a dark park, sipping on a milk shake. Or the fleeting images of what they could do once they finished their drinks and had said all they needed to say.
A warning came up from the depths of her soul, reminding her of days gone by and how badly he’d broken her heart. But only because she’d let him.
You can’t head down that road again, Jess.
No, she couldn’t.
Well, if her heart could make that decree, then she could somehow abide by it.
So she would have to make one thing very clear to herself before he came to pick her up. She would not kiss Clinton Marks again. Not in the dark. Not in a park.
The impromptu rhyme made her smile.
And if he kissed her instead?
As much as she might wish otherwise, if that ever happened, then all bets were off.
Because she might just have to kiss him back.