A Home for the M.D.. GINA WILKINS
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to rub her the right way.
That errant thought made him shift his weight uncomfortably. He studied her from the corner of his eye as she took a smiling leave of the man in the deli.
He would be on his best behavior for the next few days, he promised himself. Whatever he might have done to annoy her, he would do his best to change her mind. He wouldn’t mind having Jacqui smile at him the way she smiled at her friends here in the supermarket.
If Alice hadn’t gotten enough sleep the night before, it didn’t show during dinner that night. She chattered nonstop to her uncle throughout the meal, continued to talk while she helped Jacqui clean up afterward, then babbled even more when they joined Mitch in the family room a few minutes later. Jacqui settled in a chair in the corner beneath a bright reading lamp and pulled out the knitting bag she always kept nearby while Mitch and Alice surfed the TV channels for something they both enjoyed.
Mitch glanced Jacqui’s way during a momentary lull in Alice’s monologue. “What are you working on?”
Figuring he was trying to be polite and include her in the conversation, she lifted her project to show the ruffle-edged black scarf she was halfway through. “It’s a scarf.”
“Nice. Is this for your friend’s store? Meagan mentioned you sell your knitted stuff at a boutique,” he added.
She nodded. “A friend in Santa Fe sells handmade accessories in her shop. I met her when I lived there a few years back and I’ve been sending her stuff ever since. Mostly scarves, although occasionally she asks for baby blankets or hats or fingerless gloves, which are popular right now.”
“How long have you been knitting?”
“Since I was a kid.” A friendly neighbor had taught her the basics when her family had settled briefly in a trailer park in Utah. The woman had tried to teach Olivia, too, but Olivia hadn’t been interested. Jacqui, however, had loved the hobby, something portable she could take with her wherever they went. She had guarded the needles that sweet lady had given her as if they were made of gold and had hoarded the yarn she’d purchased with odd jobs money or the occasional allowance from her parents.
The hobby had long since paid for itself. She would never get rich selling her handcrafted wares in the boutique and on the internet, but she kept herself in yarn and needles and rarely purchased gifts when she could make them herself. She made her own sweaters, scarves, gloves and hats and even made shopping bags, dishcloths and socks.
She was delighted that Alice had been knitting for almost a year. Alice had begged Jacqui to teach her last summer and she’d gotten quite good at it since. Jacqui enjoyed sharing her knowledge, the way that nice neighbor had done with her all those years ago. Alice liked knitting soft little stuffed animals in pastel yarns, which she then donated to the local children’s hospital. The same hospital where her uncle Mitch worked, Jacqui thought, glancing at the pediatric orthopedic surgeon on the couch.
“Everything on TV is boring, Uncle Mitch. You want to play a game?” Alice asked hopefully.
“Sure, that sounds like fun,” he said, looking as if he meant it. “What have you got?”
She jumped up eagerly and retrieved a stack of games from a cabinet under a built-in bookcase, setting them on the well-used game table in one corner of the comfortable family room. Generally eschewing the video games most kids her age loved, Alice was instead a fiend for board games, nagging anyone available into playing with her. Jacqui was roped into games fairly often, especially with Alice out of school for the summer.
Alice and Mitch selected a game, sat at the table and then both looked expectantly toward Jacqui.
“Can I get you anything to drink during your game?” she asked, motioning with her knitting toward the doorway.
“Come play with us, Jacqui,” Alice urged, patting an empty chair at the table.
“Oh, I—”
Alice gave her a pleading, puppy-dog-eyes look that would have put Waldo to shame. “Please. Games are more fun with three.”
“I wonder if I should resent that,” Mitch mused aloud.
Both women ignored him. Conceding to Alice’s expression, Jacqui set aside her project. “All right. But just for a little while.”
Two hours later, they still sat around the game table. Empty soda cans sat beside Alice and Mitch, and Jacqui had just finished her second cup of hot tea. Crumbs were the only thing remaining on the plate of cookies Jacqui had brought out earlier. Scribbled score pads documented individual victories in the games they’d played that evening.
She was startled to realize how much time had passed when she glanced at the clock on the mantel. Those two hours had flown by in a blur of rolling dice and laughter. Mitch and Alice were cute together. A stranger observing them would never have believed they’d known each other only a little longer than a year, that Mitch had not known his niece-by-marriage all her life. He teased her and chatted with her with an ease that proclaimed family bonds. At least the type of family bonds Jacqui had observed while working in this household. Not so much in her own.
How might her life have been different, she wondered idly, if her own family had spent time around a table, laughing over a board game? Or even just chatting over dinner? How might she have been different?
A memory popped into her head, dimming her smile. She and Olivia sat cross-legged on the floor of a cheap motel room, playing Monopoly with a battered, salvaged set. They’d replaced the missing game tokens with different-colored pebbles and had made their own deeds and play money with scraps of paper. They’d had a few little plastic houses and hotels and enough instruction cards to make it possible for them to play. She’d been maybe twelve at the time, which would have made Olivia ten.
She remembered the wistfulness in Olivia’s smile when she’d earned enough scrap-paper money to buy a house.
“Don’t you wish it was real?” Olivia had asked, studying the little green plastic house in her hand. “Don’t you wish we could really buy a house and live in it forever?”
“Not likely,” Jacqui had answered with a brusqueness designed to hide her own old longings. “Dad would be ready to move on before we even mowed the grass the first time.”
“I’d like to mow grass.” Olivia set the little plastic house carefully into position on the game board. “When I grow up, I’m going to have a house with a big yard and I’ll mow the grass and plant flowers. Maybe I’ll have a garden and grow peaches. I love peaches.”
“You don’t grow peaches in a garden. You grow them in an orchard,” Jacqui had corrected with the wisdom of her additional two years.
“Then I’ll have an orchard,” Olivia had replied, unperturbed.
Jacqui snapped back into the present when Alice demanded her attention.
“Let’s play Monopoly now!” the teen suggested with an eager look at the stack of games they hadn’t already played.
Because there were only a few games left in that stack, Jacqui found no particular significance in Alice’s choice, despite the coincidence. Still, her throat clenched enough that she had to clear it silently before replying. “That’s all for me tonight, Alice. It’s getting late, and I have a few things to do before bedtime.”
Alice sighed, but didn’t argue, to Jacqui’s relief. When Mitch announced that he had early hospital rounds to make the next morning, Alice accepted that game night was over and began to put away the supplies.
Mitch helped Jacqui clear away the remains of their snacks. Carrying empty soda cans to the recycling bin in the kitchen, he smiled down at her when they almost bumped into each other as he reached around her to drop the cans in the bin. “Sorry.”
This usually roomy kitchen had never felt as small as it did at that moment, with Mitch standing right in front of her and the kitchen counter at her back. All she’d have to do was take one small step forward