“Mrs. Markiff met me in the bathroom to let me know how bitterly she hates me.”
“You were the only chance her boy had. We go through this, Maggie. We go through it because who will they have if we don’t?”
“I think I’m used up,” she said.
“I hope to God not,” Terry said. “We need you. What are you finding at Sully’s we can’t give you here?”
She gave a short huff of laughter. “I shot a guy who had abducted a fourteen-year-old girl.”
“That was you? At Sully’s?” she asked, surprised. “The news was pretty good at keeping the identity of the girl, the woman and the exact location of the incident quiet, but they did say it was a campground on a lake near Timberlake. I should’ve known.” She laughed and clapped a hand on Maggie’s shoulder. “You’re a tough broad, Maggie.”
“I always wanted to be something else,” she said. “One of those frail, pretty girls who men felt they had to protect. Maybe I should have let my mother dress me up and send me to dance lessons.”
“Yuck,” Terry said.
“I played touch football, with some tackling. My mother almost died of heartbreak.”
“Thank God you’ve never had an ounce of compromise in you,” Terry said. “Listen, it’s understandable if you need a break, but will you come up one of these days and have dinner at my house with Jake and maybe my daughter and her family? I miss you. I boss around those residents and I swear they pee their pants. When you’re not around there’s hardly any muscle in the operating room. It’s sad. It’s pathetic.”
Maggie was so touched she sighed. “I miss you. I miss the OR.”
“I like to hear that.”
“I have a boyfriend,” she said.
“Oh? Dr. Mathews, right?”
She shook her head. “We’ve been off a few months now. A new boyfriend. I met him at the crossing and he just won’t go away. He’s a lawyer.”
Terry laughed. “Well, that’ll probably come in handy.”
At eight o’clock Maggie said goodbye to Jaycee, Rob and her other friends. Terry drove Maggie to her house, her husband following. She pulled into the drive behind a truck.
“Who’s that?” Terry asked.
Maggie smiled. “The boyfriend. Want to meet him?”
“Bring him when you come to dinner. We’ll get to know each other then.”
Maggie got out of the car, Cal got out of the truck and they met in the drive. “Why are you here?” she asked.
“Just in case. If you need to be quiet and alone, I brought a good book. But I wanted to see you. I wanted to get my arms around a free woman.”
“They had a celebration for me. That’s my OR nurse...” she said, turning.
But Terry was moving toward the waiting car. She waved and yelled, “Bring him to dinner so we can look him over!” Then she jumped in her husband’s car and off they went.
“Very outgoing, isn’t she?” Cal said.
“Did you bring an overnight bag?” she asked.
“Always the optimist,” he said with a nod. “Have you eaten?”
“Ate, drank, laughed,” she said. “I wish I hadn’t told you I wanted to do it alone, Cal. I wish you’d been with me tonight. I have some very good friends, it turns out.”
Earth and sky, woods and fields,
lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea,
are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some
of us more than we can ever learn from books.
—Sir John Lubbock
Chapter 14
Cal suggested he drive back to the crossing rather than join Maggie for her visit with Phoebe and Walter. “When the time is right, I’ll visit them with you,” he said.
“I can’t wait to see what makes the time right,” she said. But she let him off the hook.