Many said she should have taken him for a lot more, but what she wanted was to move on with her life.
She ground her teeth. “I don’t have coverage for him for the week,” she said. “It’s spring break. You said you were going to take him to Florida. My parents are out of town and all his friends are going away too. He was all excited and now you’re canceling. Do you know what that does to a kid?”
“Life is full of disappointments,” Tucker said. “But something came up for work. I’ve got to attend a training, if you must know, so I canceled the trip with Archer. I’ll bring him over the summer. Make him understand it’s just a postponement, not a cancellation.”
She clenched her fist. Arguing never mattered and she was at work.
“Fine. The least you could do was tell him yourself. Call him tonight.”
“If I have time, I will,” Tucker said. “We’ll figure what weeks work for the summer. I’ve got to go.”
He just hung up on her. Like he did with their marriage. Decided and moved on.
She’d been nothing more than a check on his list.
A young new PA in his department where he’d just started months prior to her.
It was as if he had to show off he could get the girl, and he had. Met at twenty-five, married and pregnant at twenty-six, divorced before she was thirty.
She took a deep breath and then another, dropped her phone in the pocket of her lab coat and got ready to return to work.
She needed to take care of this but had a job to do also.
One thing at a time. Her next patient.
She pushed off the wall she was leaning on and turned the corner, only to see Jayce getting off the scale with a nurse’s aide. He was getting his temperature checked and had a blood oximeter on his finger.
Their eyes locked, his lips lifted in a smile, hers mirrored it.
For a moment the frustration of the call with her ex was forgotten.
“Hey,” he said. “This is a shock.”
Not her next patient. Thankfully.
“It is,” she said.
“Are you a doctor?”
“No. I’m a physician assistant. You mean you didn’t look me up?”
The nurse’s aide glanced between the two of them. “No,” he said. “I try not to do that. Did you?”
“Nope. I knew what you did before.”
“Right this way, Jayce.”
Farrah moved two doors down when Jayce followed the nurse’s aide to his room.
She saw her patient and put her personal dilemma behind her.
“Hi, I’m Farrah. What brings you in today?”
“I got bit by a bug a few days ago. I thought it was fine and then this morning I woke up and it looked like this.”
Her patient held her arm out. “Yikes. That looks painful. Do you know what kind of bug it was? Was it a tick?”
“Not a tick,” her patient said. “Some kind of black little bug. I slapped and killed it after it bit me.”
