They told stories from their childhood and teenage years that had him laughing right along with them till almost midnight.
When Jack was getting ready to leave, Joey slipped discreetly away so Mel could say good night to him in private. Outside, on the porch, with only the filtered light from inside the cabin, Jack stepped down a step so that he could be eye-to-eye with Mel. She draped her arms over his shoulders while he encircled her waist with his large hands. She leaned toward him and teasingly nibbled at his lower lip.
“You told her everything,” he said.
“Nah,” she said, shaking her head.
“She keeps looking at my crotch,” he said.
Giggles. “Not everything,” she said. “I kept the more delicious stuff to myself.”
“Have you been all right?” he asked, drawing his brows together in concern. “Any more tears?”
“Completely all right.” She smiled.
“I miss you already, Mel.”
“It’s only been a couple of days…”
“I missed you after a couple of hours.”
“You’re going to be a lot of trouble, aren’t you? Demanding, imposing, insatiable…”
He covered her mouth in a searing kiss that answered the question. She yielded happily, holding him closely. Ah, she thought. This is such a wonderful, powerful, sexy man. She never wanted it to end, but at length it had to. “I have to go,” he said in a husky voice. “Either that, or carry you into the woods.”
“You know, Sheridan…This place is growing on me.”
He gave her a little peck on the lips. “Your sister is great, Mel.” He gave her another.
“Get rid of her,” he said. Then with a whack on the butt, he turned and left her. When he got to his truck and opened his door, he turned to look at her. He stood there for a long time. Then he slowly lifted his hand. And she did the same. Jack was sweeping off the porch at the bar the next morning when he saw Joey and Mel walk out of Doc’s house and embrace at Joey’s car. Then Mel walked back inside and to his surprise, Joey came over to the bar.
“I’m going to shove off,” she said to him. “I thought I’d beg a cup of coffee from you on my way out of town. Mel has a couple of patients this morning, or she’d have come with me. So we said our goodbyes.”
“I’d be glad to buy you breakfast,” he said.
“Thanks, I’ve had a little something already. But I’m not going to pass up your coffee. And I wanted a moment. To talk. To say goodbye.”
“Coming up,” he said. He leaned the broom against the wall and held the door for her. She jumped up on a stool and he went behind the bar to serve her coffee. “It was great meeting you, Joey. And spending a little time.”
“Thanks. You, too. But mostly, thanks for what you’ve done for Mel. For taking care of her, looking out for her…”
He poured himself a mug. “I think you know—you don’t have to thank me. I’m not doing anybody any favors.”
“I know. Still…Just so you know, it’s easier for me to leave her here, knowing that she isn’t all alone.”
It was on his mind to tell her that he hadn’t felt like this since he was sixteen. All steamed up, crazy in love, willing to take a lot of chances for just one chance. But what he said was, “She won’t be alone. I’ll keep an eye on things.”
She sipped her coffee. She seemed to struggle with something. “Jack, there’s something you should keep in mind. Just because the crisis seems to have passed doesn’t mean…Well, there could still be some struggles ahead for her.”
“Tell me about him,” Jack said.
Joey was startled. “Why?”
“Because it might be a long time before I can ask Mel. And because I’d like to know.”
She took a deep breath. “Well, you have every right to ask. I’ll do my best. But the only thing that allows the rest of us to hold it together as well as we do is because Mel has been so fragile. It was like losing a brother. It was losing a brother. We all loved Mark.”
“He must have been one helluva guy.”
“You have no idea.” She sipped more of her coffee. “Let’s see—Mark was thirtyeight when he died, so that made him thirty-two when he met Mel. They met at the hospital. He was the senior resident in the emergency room and she was charge nurse on the swing shift. They fell in love right away, moved in together a year later, married a year after that and had been married four years. I think the most characteristic things about Mark were his compassion and sense of humor. He could make anyone laugh.
“And he was the one doctor you wanted in Emergency when there was a crisis that required the family be handled with kindness, with sensitivity. Our whole family loved him right off. His entire staff adored him.”
Jack didn’t realize that he chewed absently on his lower lip.
“It’s hard to remember that he wasn’t perfect,” she said.
“You’d be doing a guy a big favor by telling me one or two things that made him less than perfect,” he said.
She laughed at him. “Well, let’s see. He clearly loved Mel very much and he was a good husband, but she used to say that his first wife was the E.R. It’s that way with doctors anyway, and I don’t think it was much more than an irritation—she was a nurse and knew the score. But they fought about his long hours, about him going into the hospital even when he wasn’t on call. There were lots of times they had plans and he didn’t show up. Or he’d leave early and she’d take a cab home.”
“But that’s how it is,” Jack said. Marines left their families behind to do the country’s work abroad. While a part of him wished that Mel had hated her husband for frequently abandoning her for work, there was another part that held a grudging respect for a woman who knew the ways of the world and held strong through them.
“Yeah. I don’t think it threatened their marriage, not really. He’d get absorbed in his work and miss entire conversations. She said she sometimes thought she was talking to a wall. But of course, Mark being Mark, he’d apologize and try to make it up to her. I’m sure if he hadn’t died, they’d have stayed married for fifty years.”
“Come on, Joey,” he said. “Didn’t he drink too much, smack her around, cheat on her?” he asked hopefully. So hopefully that it made Joey laugh. She dug around in her purse, pulled out her wallet and flipped through the pictures until she came to one of Mel and Mark. “This was taken about a year before he died,”
she said.
It was a studio portrait, husband and wife. Mark had his arm around her and they were both smiling—carefree. Her eyes twinkled; so did his. A doctor and a nurse midwife—brilliant, successful people—they had the world by the balls. Mark’s face was familiar to Jack, having seen the picture beside her bed. But he looked at this with new eyes, knowing what he knew. Mark was not bad looking—and this was the only context under which Jack would allow himself to make such an assessment of another man. Short, neat brown hair, oval face, straight teeth. He would have been thirty-seven in the picture, but he looked much younger—he had a baby face. He did not look unlike many of the young marines Jack had taken into battle with him.
“A doctor,” Jack said absently, staring at the picture.
“Hell, don’t be intimidated by that,” Joey said. “Mel could easily have been a doctor. She holds a bachelor’s in nursing and post-grad degree in family nurse practitioner with a certification in midwifery. She’s got a brain bigger than my butt.”
“Yeah,” he said. That Joey’s butt wasn’t big was not the point she was making.
“They had as many arguments as any couple,” Joey said. “Vacations brought out the worst in them—they never wanted to do the same things. If he wanted to golf, she wanted to go to the beach. They usually ended up going somewhere he could golf while she lay on the beach, which might sound like a reasonable compromise, except for one thing—they weren’t spending the vacation together. That used to piss her off,”
she added. “And Mel, pissed off, is unbearable.
“And,” Joey went on, “he was lousy with money. Paid absolutely no attention. His focus had been purely on medicine for so long, he’d forget to pay bills. Mel took over that job right away to keep the lights from being turned off. And he was pretty anal about tidiness—I’d eat off the floor of his garage in a second.”
Such urban, upper-class problems, Jack found himself thinking.
“Not an outdoorsman, I guess,” Jack said. “No camping?”
“Shit in the woods?” she laughed. “Not our man, Mark.”
“Funny that Mel would come here,” he said. “It’s rugged country. Not too refined. Never fancy.”
“Um, yeah,” Joey said, looking into her coffee cup. “She loves the mountains, loves nature—but Jack, you need to know something…this was an experiment. She was a little crazy and decided she wanted everything different. But it isn’t her. Before Mark died, she must have had subscriptions to a dozen fashion and decorating magazines. She loves to travel—first class. She knows the names of at least twenty five-star chefs.” She took a breath and looked into his kind eyes. “She might have a fishing pole in her trunk right now, but she’s not going to stay here.”
“Rod and reel,” he said.
“Huh?” Joey asked.
“Rod and reel, not a fishing pole. She really likes it.”
“Take care of your heart, Jack. You’re a real nice guy.”
“I’ll be okay, Joey,” he said, smiling. “She’ll be okay, too. That’s the important thing, isn’t it?”
“You’re amazing. Just tell me you understand what I’m telling you. She might have run from that old life, but it’s still inside her somewhere.”
“Sure. Don’t worry. She was good enough to warn me.”
“Hmm,” Joey said. “So, what do you do for vacation?” she asked him.
“I’m on vacation everyday,” he said, smiling.
“Mel said you were in the Marine Corps—what did you do then? When you had leave?”
Well, he wanted to say, if I wasn’t recovering from some wound and we were in country, I’d get drunk with the boys and find a woman. A far cry from flying firstclass to the islands to tan on the sandy beach or snorkel in the bay. But he didn’t say that; it was another life. One he left behind. People do that, he thought briefly and hopefully; leave another life behind and move on to something new. Different. “If I had a long leave, I’d visit the family. I have four married sisters in Sacramento and they live for the opportunity to boss me around.”
“How nice for you,” she said with a grin. “Well, you have any more questions? About Mel? Mark?”
He didn’t dare. More information about the sainted Mark might do him in. “No. Thanks.”
“Well, then, I’m going to get going—I have a long drive and a plane to catch.”
She jumped off the stool and he came around the bar. He opened his arms to her and she happily gave him a robust hug. “Thanks again,” she said.
“Thank you,” he returned. “And Joey, I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Jack. You don’t have to compete with him, you know.”
He put an arm around her and walked her out onto the porch. “I can’t,” he said simply.
“You don’t have to,” she said again.
He gave her shoulders a final squeeze and watched as she walked across the street to where her car sat at Doc’s. She gave one last wave as she drove out of town. Jack couldn’t help but spend way too much time trying to picture Mel’s life as it had been with Mark. He saw an upscale home and expensive cars. Diamonds as birthday gifts and country club memberships. Trips to Europe; to the Caribbean to unwind and relax from the high stress of city medicine. Dinner dances and charity events. The kind of lifestyle that even if Jack could fit into it, he wouldn’t want to. The upscale life wasn’t alien to him—his sisters lived in that world very well. They and their husbands were educated, successful people; they had grappled with finding the best schools so their girls would be likewise. Donna, the oldest at forty-five, was a college professor, married to a professor. Jeannie, the next at forty-three, was a CPA married to a developer. Then there was Mary, thirty-seven, a commercial airline pilot married to a real estate broker—they were the country clubbers. His baby sister and the most bossy—and his favorite—was Brie, almost thirty, a county D.A. married to a police detective. He was the only one in the family who had gone into the military as an enlisted man—as a mere boy—educated only through high school. And found that what he had a gift for was physical challenge and military strategy. He wondered if Joey was right, that Mel couldn’t possibly be happy here for long in this dinky little town full of ranchers and blue-collar types, without a five-star chef within three hundred miles. Maybe she was just too classy for this backwoods life. But then an image of the Melinda he’d fallen in love with would float into his mind—