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The next evening, Fiona finally got a night off from the hospital. I usually looked forward to our evenings together, but not that night. I couldn’t put off Dr. Navarro any longer; I’d been stewing long enough.
Vern was staying over, and we’d had a nice supper I’d made of fresh squash and tomatoes from the garden alongside macaroni and cheese—a recipe I’d gotten from Eva and Lurline, the cooks at The Hicks. They were two of the finest cooks I’d ever met—even if they were a coupla wildcats. I still had the scar where they accidentally cut me when I broke up their fight with kitchen knives.
We were clearing the table and doing the dishes; the boys were upstairs, doing more horseplay than homework. I screwed up my courage and said, “I see the doctor’s back.” Fiona flinched. She didn’t need me to explain which doctor. “I wished you’d told me so I wasn’t surprised when I saw him. And it would help me think it didn’t matter to you. But you hiding it, well ...” I turned my drying towel inside a glass so hard I was surprised it didn’t bust.
When I thought she wasn’t gonna answer, just leave this big black cloud hovering over us, she spoke. “He’s only working part-time in Newland, the rest of the time in Spruce Pine.” As if that made any difference. “And I was thinking of you. I didn’t want you to get upset.”
“I’m not the one you should be thinking about. Think about little Conor whenever you see that doctor, and think about who his daddy is.”
“I know who Conor’s daddy is. He’s the man who didn’t want to have him.” She left me standing there, not moving, just holding on to that towel for the longest time. It was all twisted up when I used it to wipe my eyes.
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I was surprised how fast that old pain seared my heart again. I felt sick to my stomach. But as I went over and over what Fiona had said, I could see how her big sadness just had to come out. Fiona wasn’t talking about only Conor but also the children she’d never have, thanks to me.
I went out to my shop to work on something, anything. I picked up some wood for the spindles of a rocking chair I’d started. I turned a couple, and then as I turned anothern, I noticed how a weevil of some kind had burrowed into the wood. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to use that piece, but when I looked closer, I saw it hadn’t gone deep enough to ruin the wood. In fact, it’d made it more interesting, adding texture and a hint of color before it stopped chewing.
That seemed like such a small thing at the time. But gradually, as I shaped and sanded that wood into something good, it came to me that my problem with the doctor wasn’t all that different. I needed to stop the hurt from burrowing any deeper and let that seven-year-old heartache color my life in a good way, with gratitude for how things turned out.
I liked how that sounded. The hard part would be living into it.