3
The party for the doctor was Garner Remke’s idea. As a seventy-three-year-old who’d been slowed down by liver cancer, he hadn’t thrown a party for years. He wasn’t sure he ever had. Pulling this one off made him feel like a kid again.
The partygoers gathered at the Burnt Rock Harbor Sweet Assembly. The building stood at the base of a spectacular cliff high in the Rocky Mountains, high above Burnt Rock itself, where the air was as pure as the spring snowmelt. Built in the fifties by a wealthy family with ties to the old mining town, the Sweet Assembly was a historic landmark. It was a museum. And it was a church of sorts, which Garner occasionally attended.
But tonight it was simply the best location in town to celebrate the work of Catherine Ransom, MD, who seemed modestly flattered by all the attention.
Nearly all of Burnt Rock’s 457 residents had accepted his invitation, as happy as he was to have something partyish to do during the summer months that didn’t involve entertaining tourists. For the last two hours they’d been mingling outside under the lattice-covered patios, sipping real lemonade spiked with sprigs of mint that Garner had grown in his very own basement greenhouse. Everyone who had a grill had hauled it up to the mountain overlooking their homes, fired up the charcoal, and loosened up with a local microbrew bottled near the headwaters of the Rio Grande. They ate their fill of buffalo burgers, which had been shipped up within a day of slaughter from a free-range bison ranch down in the valley. They sawed away at venison steaks and nibbled at skewered rattlesnake and ate smoky green hatch chilies whole, right out of the tumbling fire roaster.
They entertained each other with dumb-tourist stories—the Texas oil man who didn’t believe the Rio Grande started in Colorado, the college thesis writer who asked if Burnt Rock had a Starbucks—and chatted up all the valley gossip and economic indicators of their tourist season, which was about six weeks underway. Would it be a boom or a bust? On a night such as this, with full bellies and warm hearts and boisterous company, everyone agreed: a boom.
Garner was as close to heaven as he figured he would ever get.
When he decided to call everyone inside, he enlisted the help of Hank and Karen Smith, who ran the hardware store. They had been sharing a table with Nova Yarrow, the bookstore owner, and Dotti Sanders, who was eighty going on eighteen and ran her own rental shack for river rafters. She winked at Garner when he leaned over Hank’s shoulder, then saluted him with her rattlesnake skewer.
“When are you going to attend that herb-garden seminar in Salida with me?” Dotti asked him. “You already missed the first two of the season.”
“Sign me up for the next one,” Garner said, taking pleasure in the surprise that crossed her face. Dotti had been after his companionship for two years, and tonight he finally felt accommodating.
“Well it’s about time,” she muttered.
“And we’ll have a coffee afterward. Now let’s start a trend toward the indoors,” he said. “Don’t sneak off now, or you’ll miss the desserts.” Mazy had outdone herself tonight, claiming she’d been wanting to try out some new concoctions for her popular café. But before they indulged, they would all give Dr. Ransom—Cat, Garner liked to call her—a proper welcome as a true member of the community.
Cat was laughing among a small crowd of business owners: a stable manager, a quilter, a handyman, a mechanic, and a geologist who did his field work here six months out of the year. If the men weren’t all married they might all have been besotted. The good doctor was a slight and fit woman, much shorter than the men in spite of her erect and easy thirtysomething posture. She wore her sleek black hair in a bob that swooped under her chin, and her lined eyes gave her the look of a brooding poet. In spite of these austere features she was much more approachable than anyone had expected the day she moved into the vacant offices previously occupied by a dentist. She never donned a white coat. Her soft turtlenecks and slim jeans did a far better job of instilling patients’ confidence and assuaging any anxiety they associated with doctors’ offices.
Hank and Karen were rounding up the guests when Garner took Cat’s hand and gently pulled her away from the group.
“My turn with the guest of honor,” he said. “We’re heading in. Don’t miss out!”
“You’ve outdone yourself,” Cat said to Garner.
He sandwiched her hand in his and squeezed. “I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather celebrate,” he said.
“The food was amazing, and everyone is being so kind.”
“You bet they are. No one else in this town is quite so easy to like as you. You’re good for us all.” The bookseller Nova was sitting alone at her table as Garner and Cat passed by. “Are you coming?” he asked her. Though Nova looked at Garner when he spoke to her, she gave no answer.
Mazy appeared at Garner’s side. “That one’s a bit off in the head,” the restaurateur said of Nova in low tones.
“Balderdash. She’s of sounder mind than I am,” Garner said. “And thoughtful too. She recycles all her glass jars and lets me pick out the ones I can use at the shop.”
Mazy made a pfft sound with her lips. “Frankly, I’m surprised she’s here.”
“You shouldn’t say stuff like that. She’s always real sweet to me. And the most well-read person I’ve ever met. Don’t you think so too, Cat? You probably know her better than anyone here.”
Cat lifted her eyebrows but didn’t reply, because of course, thought Garner, she was too professional and polite for this kind of nonsense.
The room where the residents of Burnt Rock gathered this lovely summer night was a theater in the round. Its beautiful domed roof boasted skylights that were big enough to see the stars sparkling in the cobalt blue sky. At the center of the circular space, a glowing fire pit that was never extinguished reflected Garner’s everlasting good mood.
Almost four hundred people filed in quickly, chattering like morning birds though the sun had set, many still holding drinks and plates of food as they squeezed onto the long benches that encircled the dancing fire pit. The gathering place didn’t exactly accommodate a crowd this size, but no one seemed to mind.
“Thank you, all!” Garner’s strong voice rapidly settled the crowd. “Thank you for coming up here tonight to celebrate my fifty-ninth birthday!”
Everyone laughed at that, and Hank yelled from the back, “And my twenty-first is tomorrow! C’mon by the hardware store—we’ll be serving shots of prune juice on the house!”
Garner drew Cat to stand next to him while the chuckling rippled around the room and finally settled into attentive silence. “All right, all right, so this old body can’t pass for fifty-nine anymore, but I am here to tell you something even more unbelievable: today my oncologist called me himself to say that my aggressive cancer has met its match.” Garner placed his arm around Cat’s shoulder and squeezed her with a sideways hug. “It’s true. That beast hasn’t spread by a single cell in the last three months. Now, the oncologist is a man of modern medicine, and you all know I don’t shun that—on the contrary, I’m grateful. But I know something else too. We all know it. And that is that we have a fine young doctor of our own among us, an attentive and smart woman who knows a thing or two about complementary therapies.”
A flurry of whistles and applause rippled around the room.
Garner held up a finger. “You know the world’s been turned upside down when someone from the big bad corporate hospitals has a kind word to say about a small-town physician.” Garner looked at Cat. “He gives you his compliments, my dear. And all of us here give you our thanks.”
“Hear, hear!” someone shouted.
“Until Dr. Ransom wandered into town one year ago today, we all limped along with our illnesses. We hunkered down here until our colds turned to infections and our flus turned to the plague and minor accidents became ‘conditions.’ We couldn’t see a doctor without driving a hundred miles down the mountain to the nearest emergency care center, spending all our money on gas and those waiting room vending machines, only to be told by big shots who don’t even know us to take two aspirin and come on back down in the morning.”
A few people booed.
“And then this young lady showed up on my doorstep with her magic bag, wanting to buy my medicinal herbs for her new clinic, and we all felt the earth shift, didn’t we?” The room rippled with bobbing heads and murmurs of agreement. “My dear Cat, you’re blushing! You probably know from our collective blood pressure that we’ve all been sitting on pins and needles waiting to see if you’d survive your first winter here—and it didn’t go easy on you, did it? No one before has loved us enough to also abide our desolate location and our annoying small-town habits. We are, after all, kind of like that extended family that gathers for Christmas dinner and gets snowed in together for unbearable weeks.”
Cat rolled her eyes. “You are not.”
“And yet she so far has not tired of our quirks, our complaints, or our ailments, real and—in your case, Hank—imagined. My friends,” Garner said over the guffaws, “Dr. Catherine Ransom has decided to call herself one of the family. Her Burnt Rock private practice is, as of this week, officially permanent, and tonight we welcome her with joy and gratitude.”
Garner led the group in applause that swelled around the room. And as it grew, he felt the warmth of the little fire at his back and the peace that had been growing in his heart across the past year. Emotion rose in his throat, and he raised his hands for quiet.
“Many of you know that I . . . that I lost a daughter many, many years ago.” He briefly pursed his lips and removed his wire-rimmed glasses. “But tonight is not a night for sad stories. I just wanted to point out that the condition of our bodies is often an indication of the condition of our hearts, and when you came here last year, Cat, I was a dying man. But you . . . you have a gift of healing, and such a big heart, and I just want to say”—he resented these watery eyes that came with his age!—“that I think of you like my daughter come home.”
The moment commanded a respectful silence. Cat tilted her head sweetly, accepting the compliments with the sophisticated smile of a fine woman, the kind of woman he’d once thought his only child might grow up to be.
“I’d be a fool to leave a place full of this much respect and appreciation,” Cat said. “Some people have real families who are far less kind to each other than all of you have been to me. I hope you all know how much Burnt Rock has done to improve the quality of my life too. And so I thank you from the bottom of my heart for making it so easy to stay.”
She placed her hand over her heart and dipped her head while everyone beamed at her. Everyone but Nova, whose wide eyes and frail body had always reminded Garner of a starving baby bird. She stood at the back of the room behind the crowd where she was nearly invisible, her brows drawn together.
Garner returned his glasses to his face and clapped his hands once. “Well, I know each person here tonight feels similarly about you in one way or another, and so—everyone! Many of you have already had much to say to Dr. Ransom, but all compliments bear repeating. She’ll be manning the dessert table, and the price for Mazy’s cherry cobbler is a word of thanks to our very fine, very own doctor!”
Nova’s departure was as swift as it was stealthy. She received none of the syrupy cobbler and liquid ice cream at the outdoor dessert table, though she could have been the first in line. Garner tried not to fret over this. It seemed no one else had noticed. Except Cat, whose eyes alighted on Nova’s tiny form for mere seconds as the bookseller left alone via the dirt trail that led back into town.
It was the only time Garner had ever seen Cat scowl.