Charlie rolled his eyes, already too cool for the jokes. “That’s a really bad one, Doctor Hale.”
“I know. What can I say?” Nathan shrugged. “Now, what band-aid would you like? I have superheroes, animal print, princesses, and regular.”
“Do you have one with cow print?” Charlie asked.
“You bet.” Nathan put a cow print band-aid on the boy’s arm. Now that Charlie wasn’t worried anymore, the little boy was smiling, swinging his legs, and looking way more cheerful.
Nathan glanced at the boy’s mom and saw that she was holding up her phone. He blinked — what was she doing on her phone when her little boy was scared? But a beat later, she slipped the phone into her pocket, and Nathan let it go.
“That’s it for today. Great job, Charlie. You were super brave.”
“Yeah,” Charlie said, grinning. “I was. Bye, cow.”
“See you next time,” Nathan said in the cow voice. “But for now, you better get a moooooove on.”
Charlie laughed and hopped down from the exam table, the paper rustling beneath him. His mom, Susan, held out a hand and he took it.
“Thank you so much, Doctor,” she said, smiling. “You’re so great with him.”
“That’s not me.” Nathan winked at her. “It’s all Bessy.”
“Who’s Bessy?” Charlie asked.
“That’s the cow’s name, silly,” Nathan explained. Charlie laughed again. The sound was bright and happy after his worry before the blood draw. It warmed Nathan’s heart, and he exchanged a smile with Susan. The phone issue was forgotten.
“Thanks again,” she said.
“It was my pleasure. You can just head back out the way you came, and my receptionist, Maya, will make sure all the paperwork is in order.”
The mother and son started for the door, but just before reaching it, Susan turned back.
“I have to ask, Doctor. Most practices have nurses to do blood draws like this. Why do you do them yourself?”
Nathan smiled, though his heart sank a little. There were plenty of answers to that question — one of them being that he couldn’t afford to employ a full-time nurse. He had two part-time nurses, but they were always run off their feet, and Nathan couldn’t call them for every blood draw. The practice was growing, but many of his patients were low-income or didn’t have insurance,and Nathan refused to charge them more than they could afford, meaning that he and his staff were always busy and underfunded.
Instead of saying that, though, he gave another, equally true, answer instead. “I like to do blood draws myself because I know how scary they can be, and I don’t want my patients to worry.”
Susan smiled. “Wow. I love it. Thanks again.”
She and Charlie left, and Nathan returned to his desk. Sinking into his chair, he smoothed his hand over the glossy surface of the desk, which he’d inherited from his father, along with many of the office’s furnishings — and the office itself. His father, Alexander Hale, had been a living legend in the rural town of Islingburn, Vermont. Even now, people talked about him all the time, and everyone had a story about him. There was the story about him saving an old man from a heart attack in the local diner. There was the story about how he’d helped a young woman give birth in a car on the side of the road during a snowstorm. And there were hundreds of smaller stories, too, about the lives he’d touched in Islingburn. Even now, three years after he passed, Nathan kept expecting to see him come around the corner with a smile and his stethoscope.
Nathan took off his glasses and cleaned them with a cloth he kept on his desk. Keeping the lenses spotless was one thing that helped him feel grounded, even when things were overwhelming. And things were definitely overwhelming now. He’d become a doctor to help people and to follow in his father’s legendary footsteps. But lately, difficulties with funding and too many hopeful patients meant that he spent less and less time with patients like Charlie and his mother, and more and more time being forced to turn people away or rushing fromappointment to appointment without enough time to give the quality care he wanted.
“What do you think, Dad?” Nathan asked. He glanced at one of the pictures he kept on his desk, an image of himself with his parents on the day of his medical school graduation. “How am I doing?”
The man in the picture shared Nathan’s short and often messy brown hair and his vivid blue eyes. Alexander had been every bit the man’s man, though. He’d been the star quarterback on Islingburn’s high school football team, gone fishing on the weekends, and never gotten flustered or overwhelmed.
Nathan, on the other hand, was more on the geeky side, with his glasses (they’d come from his mother’s side of the family), his love of facts and figures, and his difficulty embracing change. Despite their differences, his dad had been proud of him — and Nathan hoped he would still be proud now. At thirty-four, Nathan knew he shouldn’t still want his father’s praise as much as he did, but it was hard to let go.
There was a knock on the door, startling him out of his thoughts.
“Come in,” he called. The door swung open to reveal another of his patients, a young man who’d recently had his ACL repaired in Burlington after a football injury. Until now, Nathan had given him house calls to check on his recovery, but sixteen-year-old Jamie insisted that he was ready to be out and about now. He came in carefully on his crutches, and Nathan jumped up to help him get situated on the exam table.
There was no more time to think about his father or the clinic’s financial problems. There was no more time to think aboutyoung Charlie and his mother, either. Nathan had a patient to see — and patients always came first.
CHAPTER 2
ZOE
