SARA KEPT her dark green BMW Z3 in second gear as she drove through downtown Heartsdale. The car had been an impulse buy insofar as any purchase that ran over thirty thousand dollars could be considered impulsive. At the time Sara bought it, the ink was just drying on her divorce papers, and she had wanted something impractical and a little flashy. The Z3 more than fit the bill. Unfortunately, as soon as she drove the thing back from the Macon dealership, Sara realized that a car was not going to make her feel better. As a matter of fact, she had felt conspicuous and silly, especially when her family was through with her. Two years later, Sara still sometimes felt a tinge of embarrassment when she saw the car parked in her driveway.
Billy, one of her two greyhounds, rode in the passenger’s seat, his head ducked down because the clearance in the small sports car was too low for him. He licked his lips occasionally, but was quiet for the most part, keeping his eyes closed as the cold air from the vents pushed back his pointy ears. His lips tugged up a bit at the edges, as if he was smiling, enjoying the ride. Sara watched him out of the corner of her eye, wishing life could just once be that simple for her.
Main Street was fairly empty, since none of the shops stayed open on Sunday. Except for the hardware store and the five-and-dime, most of them were closed by noon on Saturday. Sara had been born here, right down the street at the Grant Medical Center back when it was the only hospital in the region. She knew every part of this street like a favorite book.
Sara made a slow turn at the college gates and coasted into her parking space in front of the Heartsdale Children’s Clinic. Despite the fact that she had the air on high, the back of her legs stuck to the leather car seat as she opened the door. She braced herself for the heat, but it was still overwhelming. Even Billy paused before jumping out of the car. He looked around the parking lot, probably regretting that he had come along with Sara instead of staying in the cool house with Bob.
Sara used the back of her hand to wipe her forehead. She had thrown on a pair of cutoff jeans, a sleeveless undershirt, and one of Jeffrey’s old dress shirts this morning, but nothing could keep the heat and humidity at bay. Rain, when it deigned to come, was about as useless as throwing water on a grease fire. Some days, it was hard for Sara to remember what it was like to be cold.
“Come on,” Sara told the dog, tugging at his retractable leash.
As usual, Billy ignored her. She let the leash out and he showed her his skinny behind as he loped toward the back of the building. There were scars on his hind legs and rear end from where the gates had popped him one too many times at the racetrack. It broke Sara’s heart every time she saw them.
Billy took his time doing his business, lazily lifting his leg against the tree closest to the building. The college owned the property be-hind the clinic, and they kept it heavily forested. There were trails back there that the students jogged along when it was not too hot to breathe. Sara had watched the Savannah news this morning and learned that they were advising people not to go outside in the heat unless they absolutely had to.
Sara checked her key ring and found the one for the back door. By the time she had it open, sweat was trickling down her neck and back. There was a bowl by the door, and she used the outside hose to fill it while Billy scratched his back on the grass.
Inside the clinic was just as hot as out, mostly because Dr. Barney, who had been a better pediatrician than architect, had insisted on lining the south-facing front wall of the building with heat-trapping glass brick. Sara could not imagine what the temperature must be in the waiting room. The back of the building seemed hot enough to boil water.
Sara did not have enough saliva left to whistle. She held the door open, waiting for Billy to amble in. After a long drink of water, he finally came. Sara watched as he stopped in the middle of the hallway, glanced around, then fell onto the floor with a snort. Looking at the lazy animal, it was hard to imagine the years he had spent racing at the track over in Ebro. Sara leaned down to pet him and remove his leash before heading back to her office.
The layout at the clinic was typical of most pediatricians’ offices. A long L-shaped hallway lined the length of the building, with three exam rooms on either side. Two exam rooms were at the back of the L, though one of them was used for storage. In the center of the hallway was a nurses’ station that served as the central brain of the clinic. There was a computer that held current patient information and a row of floorto-ceiling filing cabinets where current charts were kept. There was another chart room behind the waiting room that was filled with information on patients dating back to 1969. One day, they would have to be purged, but Sara did not have that kind of time and she could not bring herself to ask the staff to do something she herself was not prepared to do.
Sara’s tennis shoes snicked as she walked across the clean tile floor. She did not bother to turn on the lights. Sara knew this place in the dark, but that was not the only reason she left them off. The flickering of a fluorescent light, the click of brightness as the tubes came to life, would seem intrusive considering the task ahead.
By the time she reached her office across from the nurses’ station she had already unbuttoned her overshirt and tied it around her waist. She wasn’t wearing a bra, but she did not expect to run into anyone who would care.
Pictures of patients lined her office walls. Initially, a grateful mother had given Sara a school snapshot of a child. Sara had stuck it on the wall, then a day later another photo had come, and she had taped it beside the first. Twelve years had passed since then and now photographs spilled into the hallway and the staff bathroom. Sara could remember them all: their runny noses and earaches, their school crushes and family problems. Brad Stephens’s senior picture was somewhere near the shower in the bathroom. The photo of a boy named Jimmy Powell, a patient who just a few months ago had been diagnosed with leukemia, had been moved by Sara’s phone so that she could remember him every day. He was in the hospital now, and Sara knew in her gut that within the next few months another patient of hers would be put into the ground.
Jenny Weaver’s picture was not on the wall. Her mother had never brought one in. Sara only had the girl’s chart to help reconstruct their history together.
The filing cabinet drawer groaned as Sara yanked it open. The unit was as old as Dr. Barney and just as difficult. No amount of WD-40 would fix it.
“Crap,” Sara hissed as the cabinet tilted forward. The top drawer was full to overflowing, and she had to use her free hand to keep the whole cabinet from falling.
Quickly, Sara ran her fingers along the file tabs, reading off Weaver on her second run through. She pushed the cabinet back, slamming the drawer into the unit. The sound was loud in the small office. Sara was tempted to open it and slam it again, just to make some noise.
She snapped on her desk lamp as she sat, her sweaty legs skidding on the vinyl seat. Probably it would have been wiser to take the chart home. At the very least, it would be more comfortable. Sara did not want comfort, though. She considered it a small penance to sit in the heat and try to find what she had missed over the last three years.
Her wire-rimmed reading glasses were in the breast pocket of her shirt, and Sara felt a moment of panic, thinking she had broken them when she sat down. They were bent, but otherwise fine. She slipped on her glasses, took a deep breath, and opened the chart.
Jenny Weaver had first come to the clinic three years ago. At ten years old, the child’s weight had been within normal ranges in relation to her height. Her first ailment had been a persistent sore throat that a round of antibiotics had evidently cured. There was a follow-up notation in the chart, and from what Sara could barely decipher from her own handwriting, Dottie Weaver had been contacted a week later by phone to make sure Jenny was responding to treatment. She had been.
About two years ago, Jenny had started to put on weight. Unfortunately, this was not uncommon these days, especially for girls like Jenny, who had gotten her first menstrual period shortly after her eleventh birthday. Their lives were more sedentary, and fast food was more readily available than it should be. Hormones in meat and dairy products helped the process along. Case studies in some of the journals Sara read were already dealing with ways to treat girls who entered puberty as early as eight years old.
Sara continued reading through Jenny’s chart. Shortly after the weight gain began, Jenny had been diagnosed with a urinary tract infection. Three months later, the girl had come in with a yeast infection. According to Sara’s notes, there was nothing suspicious about this at the time. In retrospect, Sara questioned her judgment. The infections could have been the beginning of a pattern. She turned to the next page, noting the date. Jenny had come in a year later with another urinary tract infection. A year was a long time, but Sara pulled out a sheet of paper and made notes of the dates, as well as the two other visits Jenny had made after, both for sore throats. Perhaps Jenny’s parents shared custody. They could trace the dates to see if they corresponded with visits to her father.
Sara set down her pen, trying to recall what she knew about Jenny Weaver’s father. Mothers were more likely to bring their children into the clinic, and as far as Sara could remember she had never met Jenny’s father. Some women, especially women who were recently divorced, would volunteer information about their husbands as if their children were not in the room. Sara was always uncomfortable when this happened, and she usually managed to cut it off before it could really start, but some women talked over her, bringing up the kind of personal information that a child should never know about either parent. Dottie Weaver had never done this. She was talkative enough, even chatty, but Dottie had never disparaged her ex-husband at the clinic, even though Sara had gathered from the sporadic way the single mother paid her insurance balance that money was tight.
Sara’s glasses slipped up as she rubbed her eyes. She glanced at the clock on the wall. Sunday lunch at her parents’ was at eleven, then Jeffrey was expecting her at the station around one-thirty.
Sara shook her head, skipping over any thoughts of Jeffrey. A headache had settled into the base of her neck and the dull throbbing made it difficult to concentrate. She took off her glasses and cleaned them with her shirttail, hoping this might help her see things more clearly.
“HELLO?” Sara called, throwing open the door to her parents’ house. The cold air inside brought welcome goose bumps to her clammy skin.
“In here,” her mother said from the kitchen.
Sara dropped her briefcase by the door and kicked off her tennis shoes before walking to the back of the house. Billy trotted in front of her, giving Sara a hard look, as if to ask why they had spent all that time in the hot clinic when they could have been here in the air-conditioning. To punctuate his displeasure, he collapsed onto his side halfway down the hallway so that Sara had to step over him to get to the back of the house.
When Sara walked into the kitchen, Cathy was standing at the stove frying chicken. Her mother was still dressed in her church clothes, but had taken off her shoes and pantyhose. A white apron that read DON’T MESS WITH THE CHEF was tied loosely around her waist.
“Hey, Mama,” Sara offered, kissing her cheek. Sara was the tallest person in her family, and she could rest her chin on her mother’s head without straining her neck. Tessa had inherited Cathy Linton’s petite build and blonde hair. Sara had inherited her pragmatism.
Cathy gave Sara a disapproving look. “Did you forget to put on a bra this morning?”
Sara felt her face redden as she untied the shirt she was wearing around her waist. She slipped it on over her T-shirt, offering, “I was in the clinic. I didn’t think I’d be there long enough to turn on the air.”
“It’s too hot to be frying,” Cathy countered. “But your father wanted chicken.”
Sara got the lesson on sacrificing things for your family, but answered instead, “You should have told him to go to Chick’s.”
“He doesn’t need to eat that trash.”
Sara let this go, sighing much as Billy had. She buttoned the shirt to the top, giving her mother a tight smile as she asked, “Better?”
Cathy nodded, taking a paper napkin off the counter and wiping her forehead. “It’s not even noon and it’s already ninety degrees out.”
“I know,” Sara answered, tucking a foot underneath her as she sat on the kitchen stool. She watched her mother move around the kitchen, glad for the normalcy. Cathy was wearing a linen dress with thin, vertical green stripes. Her blonde hair, which was only slightly streaked with gray, was pulled up behind her head in a loose ponytail, much the same way Sara wore hers.
Cathy blew her nose into the napkin, then threw it in the trash. “Tell me about last night,” she said, returning to the stove.
Sara shrugged. “Jeffrey didn’t have a choice.”
“I never doubted that. I want to know how you’re holding up.”
Sara considered the question. The truth was, she was not holding up well at all.
Cathy seemed to sense this. She slipped a fresh piece of battered chicken into the hot oil and turned to face her daughter. “I called you last night to check in with you.”
Sara stared at her mother, forcing herself not to look away. “I was at Jeffrey’s.”
“I figured that, but your father drove by his house just to make sure.”
“Daddy did?” Sara asked, surprised. “Why?”
“We thought you would come here,” Cathy answered. “When you weren’t at home, that was the obvious place to check.”
Sara crossed her arms. “Don’t you think that’s a little intrusive?”
“Not nearly as intrusive as childbirth,” Cathy snapped, pointing at Sara with her fork. “Next time, call.”
After almost forty years, Cathy could still make Sara feel like a child. Sara looked out the window, feeling as if she had been caught doing something wrong.
“Sara?”
Sara mumbled a quiet, “Yes, ma’am.”
“I worry about you.”
“I know, Mama.”
“Is everything okay?”
Sara felt her color rise again, but for a different reason. “Where’s Tessa?”
“She’s not down yet.”
Tessa lived over the garage of their parents’ home. Sara’s house was just a mile down the road, but that was far enough to give her some sense of independence. Tessa did not seem to mind the closeness. She worked with Eddie, their father, in the family’s plumbing business, so it was easier for her to walk down the stairs and report for work every morning. Besides, part of Tessa was still a teenage girl. It had not hit her yet that one day she would want a house of her own. Maybe it never would.
Cathy flipped the chicken, tapping her fork on the edge of the pan. She slipped it into the spoon rest, then turned to Sara, her arms crossed. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” Sara answered. “I mean, other than last night with the girl. And the baby. I guess you heard about the baby.”
“It was all over the church before we even walked through the doors.”
“Well”—Sara shrugged—“it was very hard.”
“I can’t even imagine how you do that job, baby.”
“Sometimes, I can’t either.”
Cathy stood, waiting for the rest. “And?” she prompted.
Sara rubbed the back of her neck. “At Jeffrey’s…,” she began. “It just didn’t work out.”
“Didn’t work out?” her mother asked.
“I mean, didn’t work out as in…” Sara gestured with her hands, encouraging her mother to fill in the rest.
“Oh,” Cathy finally said. “Physically?”
Sara blushed again, which was answer enough.
“Well, that’s not a complete surprise, is it? After what happened?”
“He was so…” Sara looked for the right words. “He was…abrupt. I mean, I tried….” Again, she left out the details.
“Is this the first time that’s happened?”
Sara shrugged. It was the first time it had happened with her, but who knew about Jeffrey’s other conquests. “The part that was awful…,” Sara began, then stopped. “As long as I’ve known him, I have never seen him that mad. He was furious. I thought he was going to hit something.”
“I remember once when your father couldn’t—”
“Mama,” Sara stopped her. It was hard enough talking to her mother about this without bringing Eddie into the picture. Not to mention that Jeffrey would kill Sara if he knew that she had told anyone his performance had been less than stellar. Jeffrey’s sexual prowess was as important to him as his reputation as a good cop.
“You brought it up,” Cathy reminded her, turning back to the chicken. She snatched a paper towel off the roll and lined a plate to put the chicken on.
“Okay,” Sara answered. “What should I do?”
“Do whatever he wants,” Cathy said. “Or nothing at all.” She picked up another piece of chicken. “Are you sure you even want to bother at this point?”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning, do you want to be with him or not? Maybe that’s what it boils down to. You’ve been dancing around this thing with Jeffrey since the divorce.” She tapped the fork on the pan. “As your father would say, it’s time for you either to shit or get off the pot.”
The front door opened, then banged shut, and Sara heard two thumping noises as Tessa kicked off her shoes.
Tessa yelled, “Mama?”
“In the kitchen,” Cathy answered. She gave Sara a pointed look. “You know what I mean?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Tessa stomped her way down the hall, mumbling, “Stupid dog,” as she obviously stepped over Billy. The kitchen door bumped open, and Tessa came into the kitchen with an irritated expression on her face. She was wearing an old pink bathrobe with a green T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts underneath. Her face was pale, and she looked a bit sickly.
Cathy asked, “Tessie?”
Tessa shook her head as she walked to the refrigerator and opened the freezer door, saying, “I just need coffee.”
Cathy ignored this, and kissed her on the forehead to take her temperature. “You feel warm.”
“It’s a hundred freaking degrees outside,” Tessa whined, standing as close to the freezer as she could without actually getting in. “Of course I’m warm.” As if to reinforce this, she flapped her robe open and closed several times to generate some cool air. “Jesus, I’m moving somewhere where they get real seasons. I swear I am. I don’t care how funny they talk or that they don’t know how to make grits. There has got to be a better alternative.”
“Is that all that’s wrong?” Sara asked, putting her hand on Tessa’s forehead. As a doctor, Sara knew this was about as effective a gauge for a fever as Cathy’s kiss, but Tessa was her baby sister. She had to do something.
Tessa pulled away. “I’m premenstrual, I’m hot, and I need chocolate.” She stuck out her chin. “Do you see this?” she asked, pointing to a large pimple.
“I don’t see how we could miss it,” Cathy said, closing the refrigerator door.
Sara laughed, and Tessa popped her on the arm.
“Wonder what Daddy’s gonna call it?” Sara teased, slapping her back. When his daughters were teenagers, Eddie had taken great delight in drawing attention to their facial blemishes. Sara still felt a flush of shame when she remembered the time her father had introduced her to one of his friends as his oldest daughter Sara, and Bobo, her new pimple.
Tessa was phrasing a response when the phone rang. She picked it up on the first ring.
Two seconds passed before Tessa hissed a curse and yelled, “I got it, Dad,” as Eddie obviously picked up the extension upstairs.
Sara smiled, thinking this could have been any Sunday from the last twenty years. All that was missing was their father walking in, making some silly comment about how happy he was to see all three of his girls barefoot and in the kitchen.
Tessa said, “Hold on,” then put her hand over the mouth of the receiver. She turned to Sara. “Are you here?”
“Who is it?” Sara asked, but she could guess the answer.
“Who do you think?” Tessa snapped. She did not wait for a response. Instead, she said into the phone, “Hold on, Jeffrey. Here she is.”