Dirty: The Complete Series (Secret Baby Romance Love Story) (137 page)

“Well—I think you like them because
they’re good books, mostly,” I said. “But it probably helps that you were
hearing those stories before you were even out in the world.”

“Did Mom look anything like Mackenzie?” I
frowned at the question.

“What makes you say that?” I glanced over
at the rearview mirror; Landon was sprawled out as much as the booster seat
would allow, his head resting against the back of the seat.

“I don’t really remember her,” Landon
said. “You showed me her picture, but I’ve never seen her before.”

“You were really little when she died,
bud. You were just a baby.”

“I know,” Landon said, nodding. “But
there’s this way that Mack talks sometimes and it’s like I almost remember
Mom.”

A shudder worked through my spine. “Does
it make you feel bad or good?” I asked, almost afraid of what his answer would
be.

“It makes me feel good,” Landon said,
nodding a little bit. “I like her.” He went silent for a while and I tried to
pay attention to the world around me instead of thinking about my dead wife; I
had to keep my eyes on the road, I had to keep my son safe. “What was Mom’s
favorite food?”

“She loved a good steak,” I said, smiling
to myself. “When we finally had you, and we knew that she was going to be going
into treatment, so she couldn’t nurse you herself, we went out and got her a
great big, rare steak at her favorite steakhouse to celebrate.”

“Can we have steak for dinner tonight,
Dad?” My throat felt like it might close up on me, like I might suffocate right
there in the car. I turned the heat down a little bit in the front—I kept it on
full blast in the back for Landon—and nodded.

“Yeah, we can have steak for dinner,” I
told my son. He reached into the bag that I kept in the back seat, full of toys
for him to play with, and he was off in a world of his own, talking back and
forth between two action figures. I drove us the rest of the way home from the
park thinking about my wife, missing her, feeling the pain of her absence.

Mackenzie really wasn’t anything like
Joanne—not in the way they looked, anyway. Joanne had had the same dark hair my
son had inherited, and dark eyes to go with it. She was tall and sturdy instead
of being short and curvy and slim. I’d fallen in love with her in college; we’d
both been scholarship students, studying in different areas, but we’d met at a
meeting for the fencing club, and before long we’d spent more time flirting
with each other than actually learning how to fight with a foil.

It had taken us a few years to get
pregnant with Landon; Joanne had been determined that she wanted to have a
baby—a son, and if we could have a son first, she wanted a daughter to follow.
Just when we were about to give up on the idea of conceiving and start looking
for a baby to adopt, Joanne had finally conceived, and we’d been so happy. I’d
run out of the house at all hours of the night to pick up whatever she was
craving—whether it was dressed hot dogs with a strawberry milkshake on the side
or sauerkraut and chocolate. I was glad to see her so happy, glad that
everything seemed to be going so well for her pregnancy.

By the time she was somewhere between four
and five months along, though, things started to go bad. She was tired all the
time, and her back ached more than it should for just the typical pregnancy.
Her OB-GYN sent her to get tests done to make sure she didn’t have something
going on with her spine, and that was when we’d discovered what it was that had
made it so difficult for her to conceive; she’d had a tumor. How they could
have missed it when we’d been tested for everything else under the sun before
Joanne finally got pregnant I would never know, but they said it had been
steadily growing, right along with the baby inside of her, throughout the
pregnancy—that the hormones that had coursed through her had created the
perfect conditions for it to develop faster.

Joanne had done what she could to keep
herself healthy after that, because she had wanted to stay alive long enough to
at least give birth to Landon. When they’d done the C-section to take him out,
they’d gone ahead and removed the tumor too, but it had already metastasized to
different parts of her body. A week after she gave birth to Landon, she’d
started treatment with aggressive chemo, and in spite of the fact that our son
was as healthy as could be, the three of us spent months in and out of the
hospital, until finally she decided that she just couldn’t take anymore. She
went on pain medication and the last night of her life, she’d lain with Landon
in her arms, singing to him as they both fell asleep; she didn’t wake up the
next morning, and there I was, a single parent, all in the span of a few
months.

As I pulled into the garage for our
building, I thought to myself that I’d been neglecting an important part of
Landon’s life for years; I had avoided talking about his mom, and I had avoided
seeing anyone more than once or twice.
He
wants a mom. He needs a mom. A mom would have been good for him a couple of
months ago when he broke his leg.
I pushed aside my guilt; it didn’t do me
any good to feel bad about it now. But it might be nice to start looking for
another woman to share my life with—someone who could love Landon almost as
much as I did, who wouldn’t replace his mother, but who could be
a mother
to him.

Chapter Seven - Mackenzie

“I wish I had time to sit around and drink
coffee,” Amie said, walking up to my desk.

“You have time to come over here and
complain that you don’t have time,” I pointed out, sticking my tongue out at
her. Amie laughed.

“Like fifteen minutes. Next patient called
to say she was going to be ten minutes late—apparently Jocelyn’s piano recital
went over.”

“Because as we all know, piano is a
million times more important than walking properly.” Amie rolled her eyes.

“So what turn of events made it possible
for you to be sitting around drinking coffee?”

I shrugged, sitting back in my chair until
it squeaked.
 
“My two-thirty canceled on
me,” I explained. “So I walked around the corner and grabbed a coffee to get me
through the last few hours.”

“And you didn’t even think to ask me if I
wanted something,” Amie said, shaking her head in mock disapproval. “What a
bitch.”

I laughed.

“Yeah, well, you were busy. I didn’t want
to look like I was slacking off.”

“Which you are,” Amie interjected.

“Well yeah. But I didn’t want to look like
I was. So I sneaked out. Besides, didn’t I see you with a Starbucks cup
yesterday afternoon?” Amie snorted. It was an open secret in the office that
whoever had a cancelation was apt to run to either the closest café—a mom and
pop place that had better regular coffee than fancy things like lattes—or to
the Starbucks in the opposite direction. If we were slow then whoever ducked
out for a few minutes would take orders from everyone else, but if we were busy
it was important not to look like we were taking a break.

“How are your patients doing?” I patted
the pile of files on my desk and sighed. One of my long-time patients, who’d
been coming in three times a week for six months, was finally able to walk
competently on her own. I had advised her mother that we should probably go to
once-a-week sessions to increase the little girl’s balance and coordination,
but the mother had seemed relieved enough that her daughter could walk
unassisted that I doubted she’d follow through.

“I’ve got one who’s transitioning out of
care,” I said, smiling slightly. “And Ruby-Lee is doing really well, making a
lot of progress.”

“My Jeremy had a setback,” Amie said, her
face settling into glum lines. “I was really rooting for him, but he had a bad
weekend of seizures and now he’s lost a lot of progress.”

“I always hate when that happens.” I
sighed with her; it was heartbreaking to bring a patient to the verge of being
able to function, only to have something interfere. I reminded myself that if
I’d stuck with elderly patients, or even general practice, I’d see a lot more
of those cases—generally kids were much quicker to adapt, and faster to recover
from setbacks.

“But Cassie is doing really well! I think
she might actually be able to get clearance to start dance again in the New
Year.”

We chatted about different patients for a
while, comparing what we were doing, and picked apart an article in one of the
journals that had found that alternating hot, cold, and electrical therapies
had more efficacy than any of the individual therapies had alone. “As if we needed
a study to tell us that,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I’ve been doing that with
the bad ones ever since I got my license to practice.”

“Well, but at least we can tell some of
those anti-vax parents that there
is
proof,”
Amie pointed out. We both made faces at the mere idea of anti-vaccine parents.
More than a few of our patients that had come in over the months were ones
whose parents had refused vaccines; when the babies got whooping cough or flu
or something like that, their fevers climbed and they got brain damage that
they had to spend years and years working through. I had told more than one of
my former high school friends that if they refused to vaccinate their children
I would never speak to them again; only a couple were stiff-necked enough to
actually go against me, but I knew that there was a good chance that I’d end up
seeing their kids in my practice, victims of brain damage or nerve damage from
one disease or another.

I finished off my coffee, wishing I’d
bought one of the delicious-looking apple pastries to go with it while I’d been
in the café. “I have one patient that’s all good news,” I told Amie.

“Oh? Which?”

“Landon Willis. He’s making tons of
progress.”

 
Amie laughed. “Imagine that. When his dad brought
him in late that first session you were sure that he’d be one of those that
fell through the cracks.”

“Well I had reasons to believe that!” I
wagged my finger at Amie. “How often does a parent bring their kid in late for
an evaluation and then go on to be even halfway decent about follow-through in
their therapy?”

“True,” Amie said, nodding. “So he’s a
decent dad?”

“He’s really decent,” I told her. “Really
worried about his son. Wants to do everything right.”

“And he’s hot,” Amie pointed out. “That’s
always helpful.” I rolled my eyes at her, chucking my coffee cup into the trash
bin. “Ooh—is he single?”

“Yes,” I admitted, and I felt my cheeks
burning up with a blush.

“Look at that! Oh man you’ve got it for
him, don’t you?”

“He’s a patient’s father,” I protested. “I
can’t have anything for him other than a respect for the fact that he’s taking
good care of his kid.”

“You can have the hots for him just fine,”
Amie said. “There was a guy like…a year ago. He was so hot. He looked like Brad
Pitt from like twenty years ago. I could barely keep my mind on work when his
daughter came in for her sessions. I kept thinking of all the ways the
equipment could come in handy for sex.”

“You’re terrible!” I shook my head. “There
are
kids
using those machines.”

“It’s not like I’m saying I’d use it to
have sex with them!” Amie looked at me wide-eyed with pretend shock. “But it’s
the same equipment we’d use on an adult, most of the time. And you can’t tell
me the TENS unit wouldn’t be fun to play with if you found the right
open-minded guy.”

“You are depraved.” I shook my head again.
“Don’t you have like, two boyfriends right now? Why are you peeking at
patients’ parents?”

“Greener pastures, girl,” Amie said. “I’m
always on the lookout for a better option.”

“So you’re never going to be happy with
what you’ve got,” I told her. “Because you’re going to keep looking for a
hotter, sexier guy. You could land Brad Pitt himself and you’d still look—and
waste all that Brad Pitt hotness.”

“I’m not saying I’m not happy with what I
have,” Amie told me, holding up a hand to forestall me saying anything. “I’m
just saying that if a better option shows up, I’m on board.” She looked me up
and down, her lips twisting into a weird half-smile. “I think your problem is
that you’re not looking at all.”

“That’s not fair!” I gestured to my
cluttered desk. “I’m crazy busy all the time.”

“So am I, but there are these things
called phones. You can use them while you’re doing other things. They even have
apps that let you find people who are interested in meeting up and maybe
hooking up.”

“I don’t want to just hook up with
someone,” I said, frowning. “I want to find someone I can really have a
relationship with.”

“They have apps for that too. Girl, you
must be getting desperate if you’re getting all worked up over a patient’s
parent.”

“I’m not getting worked up over him!” My
cheeks burned even hotter. “I swear to god—they’re coming in later, and if you
even look at me while they’re here I’ll beat the hell out of you.”

“You
are
hot for him,” Amie said, looking at me a little more seriously. “Not that I
blame you. He’s totally got the goods.”