He Thought Tuesdays Were Pottery, Now He Begs Me Home novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Offer on the Step

Bennett shows up at dawn with coffee and an offer, Joss answers with the one question he never asked, and Preston warns her off the ER job.

At six the next morning Odessa Thurber shook me awake with a pencil in her hair and one eye open.

Everyone calls her Dess.

"Your husband is on my stoop," she said.

"Ex-husband."

"Your ex-husband is on my stoop holding two coffees and looking like a man who got hit by a bus."

Judge, her one-eyed cat, sat on my chest and watched me with his single yellow lamp.

I'd slept four hours on Dess's fold-out in Tremont, in yesterday's blouse.

My law school notes were under my pillow because I had nowhere else to put them.

I pulled on my coat and went down.

Bennett was sitting on the top step of the walk-up with a cardboard tray beside him.

He hadn't shaved, and he still had the suit on from the hospital.

He stood up when I came out.

"She's stable," he said. "Two stents. The cardiologist says the next ten minutes on those steps decided it."

"I'm glad."

"She wouldn't let me tell you thank you," he said.

"That sounds right."

He held out a cup.

"Vanilla latte. Extra shot. I figured you hadn't eaten."

I took it and didn't drink it.

"Joss, I've been up all night, and I've thought of a way to fix this."

"Okay," I said.

"The company needs a general counsel. We've been outsourcing it for years. I'd start you at three hundred thousand. You'd report to me, no one else. You could have the house back too, and the board seat Dad left empty."

He leaned toward me.

"You wouldn't have to hide anything again. I'd put it in writing."

I waited until he'd finished.

"Bennett, what do I take in my coffee?"

"What?" he said.

"Not this. What do I take?"

He looked at the cup in my hand, then at me.

"Vanilla," he said slowly. "You've ordered it every morning since..."

"Since your mother ordered it for me on our first Sunday, and I didn't want to be rude."

His mouth opened.

"I drink it black," I said. "I've drunk it black since I was fifteen. You never noticed in five years, and I never told you, and I'd like you to think about why that was."

He said nothing.

"I'm not saying it to hurt you. I'm saying you're offering to hire a woman you've never met."

"Then let me meet her," Bennett said.

It was a better answer than I expected, and it still wasn't the one that mattered.

"Go home and sleep," I said. "Your mother needs you awake."

Dess was in the window of the second floor when I looked back, holding Judge up to the glass.

She raised her fist at me in solidarity.

I took the bus to Metro.

The cardiac unit was on the fourth floor, in the new wing with a brass plaque by the elevator that read THE ALAN HETHERINGTON PAVILION.

I had stood at that man's bedside while he died.

His widow was propped on three pillows when I reached her door, with her hair done and her pearls restrung.

A nurse stood by the bed, and a cardiologist.

I had come to give the cardiologist my notes from the steps, nothing else.

Rosalyn turned her head.

"That girl is not to come near me," she said clearly, to the room. "She is playing doctor, and she has an agenda. I want her removed."

The nurse's eyes slid to me and away.

I handed the cardiologist two handwritten pages with the shock times, the pulse check and the rhythm.

"Your hospital's defibrillator worked," I said. "I'd have her on a statin tonight. Mrs. Hetherington."

"Josephine," said Rosalyn.

"Rest."

I walked out with my spine straight and my hands steady, and halfway down the corridor they stopped being steady at all.

I stood by a window and waited for it to pass.

"Tarrant."

Cliff Dempsey leaned against the wall, in a clean pair of scrubs, with a cup of black coffee he'd obviously made for himself.

He held it out.

I looked at it.

"Black," he said. "You used to take it in the call room with three sugars and complain."

"Two," I said, and took it.

It was exactly right.

"I'm not here to talk about the letters," Cliff said. "I've got a ten o'clock. I'm here because the night attending on Friday and Saturday called in sick for the next six months."

"Did she."

"She did. She's an invention of mine."

He almost smiled.

"Your license is clean. I checked every spring for four years. Metro will give you provisional privileges at the credentials meeting tomorrow, and I cosign for six months. Friday, eight to eight. Your badge still opens the doors."

I stared at him.

"I could just say yes," I said.

"You could say you need to think about it."

"I did my thinking on Tuesday."

I drank the coffee.

"Friday," I said.

Cliff nodded once and pushed off the wall.

His eyes stayed bright for a second longer than he meant.

I rode the elevator down to the parking garage to pick up the gym bag I'd stashed in Dess's old Subaru.

A man was leaning against the driver's door with his ankles crossed.

He was blond and tanned in October, in boat shoes and a good camel coat.

His smile went to every part of his face except his eyes.

"Cousin," said Preston Hetherington. "Heard you were the hero of the courthouse."

"Preston."

"Aunt Rosalyn wanted me to give you a message." He tilted his head. "Don't take the job."

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