From Brooding Boss to Adoring Dad. Dianne Drake

Erin, and shook hard when she took it. “I appreciate your offer. Good afternoon, ma’am Doctor.”

      Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. The polite, customary greeting always used when addressing others. It was expected, especially in the more rural areas such as Regina. Her father had told her about this, told her to remember it. “Good afternoon, Mr Clarke. I’ll take very good care of Tyjon.”

      Apparently, Ennis Clarke trusted that, because he turned and ran out the door, which gave Erin only a few minutes to assess the boy’s foot before Adam Coulson took over. She didn’t like that idea. But, then, she had no idea what kind of doctor he was. Didn’t even know if he was a real doctor, for that matter. “So, tell me what happened, Tyjon.”

      “I stepped on glass. Broken bottle in the street. Cut my foot.”

      “When? This morning?”

      He shook his head. “Two days ago. It wasn’t so bad then. We washed it and it was OK. But now it hurts worse. And it started to bleed some more.”

      She began unwrapping the towel, trying to be gentle because the dried blood had caused it to stick to his foot. When Tyjon winced, she slowed down the process, and as she peeled back the bulky layers and got closer to the wound, the smell of infection became noticeable. “Did you wash it with soap?” she asked.

      He nodded. “My mother washed it very good.”

      “And did you put on shoes and socks after you washed it?”

      “No, ma’am Doctor. I don’t like shoes.”

      Down to the last layer, she peeled it back carefully, and what she found wasn’t good. The cut was on his heel, almost the length of his heel. Very jagged, very dirty. And swollen. There was also pus, much more than she’d expected. General redness everywhere. On top of that, his whole foot seemed warm and slightly puffy. She needed supplies, something antiseptic to start the cleaning. Antibiotics at the very least. Suture materials. But she had … nothing at all.

      Erin looked around. If Trinique was a healer of some kind, maybe she had a first aid kit. “I’ll be right back, Tyjon. I need to go and find something to clean up your foot.”

      Water would work for starters. Get the dirt off. Give her a better look at what she had to deal with.

      In the kitchen, she filled a basin full of water, grabbed two clean dishtowels then returned to Tyjon, who was laughing over something Doc Adam had apparently told him. Adam Coulson looked up at her. Saw the basin of water. “Fetching my cleaning supplies for me?” he asked.

      “What I’m fetching is a basin of water so I can begin to clean Tyjon’s foot.”

      “She’s a ma’am doctor,” Ennis Clarke explained quite seriously.

      “So she says,” Adam snorted, standing then walking straight over to Erin and taking the basin of water from her hands. “My bag …” He pointed to it sitting next to the door. “Find my antibiotic cream in there. If I have any left. And I probably have some suture. See if you can also come up with a vial of lidocaine, too. I’m pretty sure I have some of that.”

      “Pretty sure?”

      He shrugged. “Supplies aren’t easy to come by. We have to make do, sometimes.”

      “How do you make do without suture? Or lidocaine?” Lidocaine hydrochloride, more specifically, was the anesthetic agent he’d inject into Tyjon to dull the pain of the stitches.

      “When you don’t have it, you don’t have it. So, you improvise.”

      She wasn’t sure what that meant. Wasn’t sure she even wanted to find out.

      “Davion,” Adam continued, “run back to the clinic and see if I have any antibiotic cream samples there so I can give them to Ennis. I think I might have a few left. Also, bring me a syringe and a vial of penicillin.”

      “Penicillin?” Nobody used that any more. There were newer, much more effective drugs on the market. Occasionally, she’d prescribed one of the penicillin derivatives, but never penicillin itself.

      “Good drug,” Adam quipped. “Highly underrated today, and even more highly underused.”

      “And cheap,” Davion said on his way out the door.

      “Well, that, too,” Adam agreed. He dipped the kitchen towel into the basin of water and started to wash Tyjon’s foot.

      It had to hurt. She saw the poor boy grimacing, and wondered if the infection had spread beyond his foot. What she saw even more than that, though, was the gentle way Coulson was taking care of Tyjon. Soothing hands. It was a term her father used. He’d always said the best doctors didn’t get so tied up in the book learning that they forgot how to have soothing hands. He’d had those soothing hands for her all those times she’d been sick after her chemotherapy, during all those times she hadn’t been sure if she’d live or die. She remembered her father’s soothing hands and right now what she saw with Adam Coulson was what she’d known from her father.

      “What can I do to help?” she asked, after a quick look through his medical bag produced a vial with barely enough lidocaine to do the job, a scant amount of fresh suture, a few pieces of candy, a package of sterile gauze strips and a stethoscope with shredded rubber earpieces.

      “You a surgeon?” he asked.

      She shook her head. “Pediatrician.”

      “Then you’d be good at stitches because kids always need them.” Assumption made. It wasn’t a question.

      “I’ve done my fair share.”

      “OK, I’ll let you do the honors. In the meantime, freshen up the water in the basin.”

      The water was nearly black with dirt, which made her cringe because all that dirt had come from Tyjon’s foot.

      “Please,” Adam added.

      “What?”

      “Please. You were standing there, staring at the basin, so I figure you were waiting for me to say please. So … please.”

      She hadn’t been waiting for politeness. From Adam Coulson, whom she’d known for only an hour, she expected none. But her hesitance was … well, she couldn’t explain it. What she was seeing here wasn’t exactly a shock, because there were areas all over the world where the medical standard was different from her medical standard. What she didn’t understand was the doctor—his casual attitude, his lack of basic medical supplies. “Are you really a doctor?” she asked. “Educated in a regular medical school, licensed to practice?” The question just popped out of her.

      He paused in his bathing of Tyjon’s foot, looked up at her, frowned for a moment, then broke into a broad smile. “A little while ago, Davion had almost convinced me to feel guilty about refusing to hand over the deed to my land. Honestly, I was feeling a little bad about the way I was treating you, and fully prepared to apologize for it. Like I said, that was a little while ago. But not any more. Now, the water, please.”

      So, maybe she deserved that. She wasn’t about to apologize for asking, but she wasn’t going to take too much offense to his reaction either, because she shouldn’t have challenged him that way, especially not in front of Tyjon. So, before she said something else she’d regret, Erin picked up the basin, returned to the kitchen, and dumped out the old water. As she gave the basin a quick wash with dish soap and water, she thought about why she was here, and it was too important to let these skirmishes with Adam Coulson get in her way. Make no mistake, they could get in the way if she wasn’t careful. He was, after all, the local doctor. While she had all her permissions in place for the hospital, and all the legalities out of the way, having the doctor with her, rather than against her, was smart. So for now, she’d have to curb her temper. “For you, Dad,” she whispered, fighting the tears welling up in her eyes when she thought about the graceful way her father was accepting his fate. She didn’t have that same gracefulness about her in any sense, no matter