They Laughed When I Left, So I Came Home the Town's Doctor novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Microphone
At the hospital's welcome reception Kaarina Ahola sneers at Sanna's twins in front of the board, Sanna takes the microphone and promises the answer on October twelfth, and her ex-husband walks in and asks if the children are his.
The first thing Kaarina Ahola said to me in six years was a question about my children.
"Whose are they, Sanna?"
She said it loud enough to carry across the hotel ballroom.
Two hundred people were holding paper plates and plastic cups of wine.
The hospital board was welcoming its new emergency physician, and the new emergency physician was me.
I had just handed my daughter a napkin when she stepped in front of us.
She wore a pale gray cardigan with pearl buttons, and her silver hair sat in the same neat roll.
She had not changed at all.
"Does the father know you're parading them around?" she said.
My daughter looked up from her cookie.
She was five, with red-blond braids and yellow rubber boots she wore to every occasion, including this one.
"Parading what?" she said.
"Eat your cookie, buddy," I said.
My son pressed against my leg.
He was five too, small for it, with a cowlick at the left crown that nothing ever flattened.
He held his juice in his left hand and said nothing.
The people nearest us had gone quiet.
A woman from the church circle turned her whole body to watch.
Behind her, a man I had known in high school lowered his phone and raised it again.
Six years ago, the town had laughed at me.
Not to my face, mostly.
It had been a quiet laugh at the grocery store and the pharmacy, the kind that stops when you turn around.
The doctor's wife had left her husband, and then she had left Marquette, and nobody could say why.
Kaarina had given them a reason.
I could hear it in every pause now.
"Dr. Lahti has a long record," Kaarina told the people around her, in her church voice. "Minneapolis, I hear. A lot of changes in her life."
"Kaarina," said the board chair, uncomfortable.
"I'm only asking what everyone wants to ask," she said. "Two children, no husband, no name for the father. In this town we like to know whose we are."
I felt my mother's hand close on my elbow.
She had come in behind me with her purse held in front of her.
"Sanna," she said quietly. "We can go."
I looked at my children.
My daughter had put her cookie down, which she never does.
Onni was watching my face, trying to work out what came next.
I did not want to go.
I had spent six years becoming a person who did not have to leave rooms.
I handed my mother my juice cup.
Then I walked to the little stage at the end of the hall, where the board chair had left the microphone on its stand.
My heels were loud on the boards.
The room turned with me.
"Good evening," I said into the microphone, and the speaker coughed. "I'm Dr. Sanna Lahti, and I'd like to thank the board."
Nobody clapped.
"I came here tonight to sign a contract."
I took the folder from the table beside the stage and set it where everyone could see it.
I uncapped the pen.
"It's a permanent one. I'm staying."
I signed my name across the line, slowly, with two hundred people watching.
The board chair let out a surprised laugh and then clapped.
A few nurses by the door clapped louder.
The noise rose, and then I lifted my hand and it dropped.
"Mrs. Ahola asked whose children those are," I said.
I did not look at Kaarina.
I looked at the back of the room.
"She deserves an answer, and so does everyone else who has wondered for six years."
"Sanna," said Kaarina, very quietly, from the floor.
"You'll have it on October twelfth," I said. "At the Ahola boathouse, at the whitefish boil, in daylight. In front of everybody."
Nobody in the hall moved.
Kaarina's face did something I had never seen it do.
For one moment it looked afraid.
"You will not," she said.
"I will."
I put the cap back on the pen.
I walked down the steps and across the floor to my children, and the crowd let me through.
My mother whispered, "Well, that's done it."
I did not answer, because I was looking at the double doors.
A man stood in them with sawdust on his canvas jacket.
He was tall and broad, with dark hair going gray at the temples and a short beard that was new.
Tuomas Ahola had come to the reception to see his mother off at the car.
He had come in too late to hear any of it.
He was looking at my son.
Onni lifted his left hand to wave at nobody, and the cowlick stood up in the light.
Tuomas crossed the room without seeming to see anyone.
He stopped a step in front of me, close enough that I smelled cedar and lake wind.
His voice was rough and very low.
"Sanna," he said. "Are they mine?"
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