The Doctor's Do-Over

Quinn bounded into the kitchen—Mel had often wondered if the child had springs on the soles of her feet—and straight to the table to snatch a carrot slice. “When’s dinner? I’m about to expire from hunger.”

“Ten minutes,” Mel said, carting the chopped veggies to the stove to dump them into the sizzling oil. “You can set the table. Dishes are up there.” She nodded toward the cupboard next to the sink. “Used to be, anyway.”

After filching a pepper slice, Quinn swung open the cupboard door, nearly gagging when she pulled down an avocado-green Fiestaware plate that looked like it hadn’t been washed in twenty years. “Gross!”

“Hey,” April said with a laugh. “When we were kids we’d’ve rinsed it off and called it good.”

“And you, child of mine,” Mel said as she stirred, “used to lick the kitchen floor.”

Shock and horror bloomed in Quinn’s blue eyes. “Did not!”

“Got the video to prove it. You apparently have the immune system of an android. Palmolive’s right on the sink, baby. Go for it.”

After dinner, during which they talked, and laughed, and reminisced more than Mel had any idea they could, Quinn disappeared again to poke through those ten thousand books—heaven!—while April and Mel cleaned up. Her hands deep in Palmolive suds, April looked over at Mel, drying the dishes and stacking them on the counter rather than putting them back with their disgusting little friends.

“Dinner was fantastic. You always cook like that?”

“Thanks. And yes. Cooking’s my thing.”

“Really? Huh.” Behind her, Mel heard sudsy swishing. “So … is Quinn’s father in the picture?”

“Nope,” Mel said lightly. “Never has been.”

More swishing. Then: “Is she Ryder’s kid?”

Yeah, she’d expected that. Still, the assumption needled. Especially since there were other people in town who’d be all too eager to leap to the same conclusion. “No. As I said, Ryder and I were friends. Good friends.” She felt a tight smile tug at her mouth. “There was no way anything untoward would have happened between us. He would have never let it.” At her cousin’s silence, Mel turned. “What? You don’t believe me?”

“Oh, I believe you. But I also remember that last summer we were all together, when Ryder took the three of us out on his dad’s boat.” Hauling the clean skillet onto the drainboard, April slid Mel a devilish grin. “I also remember the way he looked at you when he thought nobody would notice.” A wet hand pressed to her chest, she released an exaggerated sigh. “And I thought if a boy looked at me like that? I’d absolutely die of happiness. Die, I tell you.”

“And how many romance novels did you read that summer?”

April belted out a laugh, the sound unexpected from her delicate frame. “Best. Summer. Ever,” she said, and even Mel had to smile, at how they’d discovered their grandmother’s stash of old, yellowing Harlequins in a trunk on the porch, clandestinely stashing them in their beach towels to read aloud to each other as they sunbathed. Damn books were probably still in the house somewhere. If they hadn’t completely disintegrated by now—

“However,” her cousin went on, “I also caught the way you looked at him. And don’t you dare try to deny it. These eyes know what they saw, yes, they do.”

Overhead, Mel heard the floorboards creak. “Fine,” she said with a quick glance toward the ceiling. Either Quinn had changed rooms upstairs or there was a raccoon the size of Cincinnati up there. “So I might have had a little crush on him. I mean, I suppose it was inevitable, considering how kind he’d always been to me.”

April laughed again. And flicked water at her.

“He was my friend, April,” Mel said, zapping her cousin with the damp towel. “And that was the only thing that mattered.”

Wringing out the sponge and laying it on the edge of the sink, April turned to her with a frown. “Then why’d you two stop talking to each other?”

“Because we just did!” Mel slammed the last plate a little too hard on the pile, then shut her eyes, thinking, Yeah, hand her the gun to shoot you with, why not?

She heard April dump the sudsy water into the sink, yank another dishtowel off the old “finger” rack under the counter.

“That’s probably not dry yet,” Mel muttered. “I just washed it this afternoon.”

“It’s fine.” April wiped her hands and hung the towel back up, then leaned closer to the sink to look out the window at the plum-colored sky. “I didn’t mean to upset you, honey. But being back here … guess it’s made me a little melancholy. Like I want to recapture a little of that magic, you know?”

“I do, actually. But it’s not possible.”

“I know. Still, it’s sad. You and Ryder losing touch.” She turned to Mel. “Don’t you think?”

“I don’t. Think about it, I mean.” Or at least she hadn’t until a five-minute phone call once more snatched the rug right out from under her.

“You think you’ll see him while you’re here?”

“Not planning on it. And can we please change the subject—?”

The doorbell rang. After a fashion. “Oh! I bet that’s Blythe,” April said, heading out of the kitchen. “Last time we talked she said she didn’t know if she’d get in tonight or tomorrow …”

Not at all sure if she was ready to deal with her older, bossier cousin, Mel turned on the old radio that had been in that same spot on the counter forever, fiddling with the dial until she picked up some oldies rock station from Dover … the same music her mother had listened to while cooking in the Caldwells’ kitchen when she’d been growing up. Over Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence”—heh—she heard April’s cheery, non-stop prattle coming closer. Steeling herself, Mel turned, a forced smile stretching her cheeks.

And nearly passed out.

“That last thing you were saying? You might want to revise that,” April said, clearly enjoying the heck out of the moment before she vanished, leaving Mel to face Ryder all by her little self.

Ridiculously handsome, all-grown-up, obviously angry-as-hell Ryder.

Yippee-skippy.

“How’d you know I was here?”

Mel had left Quinn with her cousin—since no way was she going to have this little reunion in her daughter’s presence—but it’d taken her a good ten minutes to work up to the question. This being the awkward moment from hell and all. Now she sensed Ryder—who hadn’t exactly been chatty, either—glance over as they strolled, bundled up against the frigid night air, along the marina at the edge of town. A trek they’d made innumerable times as kids, at all times of the day and night, in every imaginable kind of weather. Mostly just for something to do away from the adults, sometimes on their bikes or inline skates when there weren’t too many people around….

And cocooning herself in the used-to-bes wasn’t going to do a blessed thing to stop the vague nausea brought on by having to face the right-nows.

“Phil Paxton told my dad,” Ryder said, that comfortingly familiar voice conjuring up so much of what she’d made herself forget, and there it was, the past colliding with her present, boom. Even his obvious irritation provoked memories, of when he’d get ticked off over some dumb prank or other she’d pulled as a kid. Man, this was doing even stranger things to her head than walking back into her grandmother’s house. “Said Amelia’d left you three her place, that you were coming down to get everything in order.”

“Big mouth,” she muttered.

“Was it supposed to be a secret?”

At the word “secret,” Mel flinched, then dug a tissue out of the down vest she’d thrown over her hoodie to wipe her drippy nose. “I don’t suppose.”

“Anything else you’d like to share?”

No need to ask what he meant, since the disbelief icing his words said it all. Even so, she had no idea what she was and wasn’t allowed to say, to admit to, even now. “Depends. What’ve you heard?”

“That you and Jeremy had a kid together.”

She stuffed the tissue back in her pocket. “Jeremy may be Quinn’s biological father, but to say we had her together is a stretch.”

Silence crackled between them, far more biting than the damp air, until Ryder finally broke it with, “God, Mel—why?”

“Because I was a mess and he was there.” And you weren’t, she thought, startled at the residual anger after all this time. “Sad, but true.” More silence, punctuated by the soft clattering of the docked boats, Ryder’s steady footsteps against the wood. “When did you find out?”