Chapter 16: Four Years North

The wind off Muscongus Bay rattled the clinic's front windows on a Tuesday in October, four years after I left Georgia.

I was in the exam room with a lobsterman's sliced thumb in my hand and a suture needle in the other.

A gull was shouting on the roof.

"You've got good hands, Ione," the lobsterman said. "Better than the doctor in Rockland."

"I've got four years of practice on you people."

"We're an awful lot of work," he said.

"You're a lot of thumbs."

He laughed, and I tied off the last stitch.

I was thirty-two years old.

I wore my hair in a bob now, cut to my jaw the winter we moved.

My coat carried a nameplate on my coat that read Ione Dufresne, FNP-C, Lead Nurse Practitioner.

I had earned the extra letters at night, with a baby on my knee.

There was a gull on the roof and a pot of chowder in the break room.

My son in the next building over, learning to count by sorting periwinkle shells.

For four years I had not once said the word Savannah out loud before noon.

The front desk buzzed.

"Ione?" the receptionist said through the intercom. "There's a man at the front who says he has a delivery for you personally. Won't leave it."

I peeled off my gloves.

He stood in the waiting room in a Georgia Bulldogs rain jacket that dripped onto the mat.

He was perhaps forty, sunburned, with a manila envelope in a plastic sleeve.

"Ione Dufresne?"

"That's me."

"You've been served," he said, and held it out.

I took it, because that is what the hand does.

"By who?"

"It's all in there, ma'am. Have a good day."

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