They Laughed When I Left, So I Came Home the Town's Doctor novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Terms

In the coat room Sanna tells Tuomas no, sets her terms, and brushes off the chief of surgery, until a text says the Ahola Fish Boil is cancelled and the boathouse locked.

I took him by the sleeve and walked him out of the ballroom.

I did not want my son hearing the answer.

The coat room was a long closet behind the lobby, full of damp wool and wire hangers.

I shut the door behind us and stood with my back against it.

Tuomas stood in the middle of the room with his hands open at his sides.

"No," I said. "They're not yours."

He nodded slowly.

Then his jaw moved, and he turned his face toward the coats.

I had not expected that.

I had expected anger.

Six years of practice had taught me how to meet his anger.

"All right," he said. "Okay."

"Tuomas."

"Give me a second."

I gave him a second, and then another one.

I counted the hangers on the rail to keep my face still.

When he turned back, his eyes were red but his voice was level.

"Whose are they?" he said.

"I'll tell you on the twelfth."

"That's nineteen days," he said.

"You can count," I said. "Good."

"Sanna." He said my name plainly, the way he had always said it. "You walked up on a stage and told two hundred people before you told me."

"I told two hundred people because your mother asked two hundred people."

That landed.

He looked at the floor and rubbed the split thumbnail he's had since he was twenty.

"She shouldn't have done that," he said.

"No," I said.

"I'll talk to her."

"Don't," I said. "You'll make it about you, and it isn't."

He took that without arguing, which was new.

The old Tuomas would have said something short and gone out to his truck.

"Here's what I don't understand," he said. "If they aren't mine, and you won't say whose, what do you want from me?"

"Nothing," I said.

"Then why did you let me stand there and ask?"

"I didn't let you," I said. "You walked across a ballroom."

He almost smiled.

It was the first time I had seen his face move that way in six years, and it hurt more than the crying had.

"I don't care whose they are," he said.

I stared at him.

"Say that again."

"I don't care. I saw him wave. I saw the girl in those boots." His voice caught and he pushed through it. "I've spent six years thinking you were gone for good. You're in a coat room, and you're mad at me, and you came home. I don't need a name to want to see them again."

"You don't get to say that yet," I said.

"Why not?"

"Because you don't know what you're saying yes to."

It came out harder than I meant.

He took it.

"Then tell me what you want," he said. "I'll do it."

I made the rules up as I spoke.

I had not planned them.

"You see the twins at school events and in public places, and I'm there. You don't come to my house. You don't ask me whose they are, not once, not in a joke. And you don't touch me."

"That's three," he said.

"Then you can count too," I said.

He looked at his hands.

"I'll keep them."

"You say that now," I said.

"Sanna, I kept my mouth shut for a whole marriage. I can keep three rules."

The door opened behind me and almost knocked me forward.

"There you are," said my mother.

She held Onni by one hand and had Helmi hooked under her other arm.

"Mama, I'm in a closet," said Helmi, delighted.

"Your mother is a busy woman," said my mother. "Tuomas Ahola, you have gone gray."

"Yes, ma'am."

"It suits you. Don't let that go to your head."

She set Helmi down and looked at him a moment longer.

I knew that look.

It was the look she gave a student who had finally turned in the missing assignment.

"Onni, say hello to Mr. Ahola," she said.

Onni looked up, left hand in his pocket.

"Hello," he said. "Do you build boats?"

"I do," said Tuomas, and his voice cracked in the middle.

"Do you build bridges?"

"Not yet."

"Okay," said Onni, and went back to examining the coats.

My mother steered both children out into the lobby.

She gave me a look over her shoulder that said we would be discussing it later.

I opened the door to follow her.

A man in a quarter-zip and a nice watch was leaning on the wall outside, with a drink in each hand.

He had silver at the temples and a smile that had been practiced.

"Dr. Lahti," he said. "I'm the chief of surgery. That was quite an exit."

"It was a contract signing."

"It was a performance. I loved it." He held out one of the drinks. "Let me take you to dinner and you can tell me who else I should be afraid of."

Behind me I heard Tuomas draw a breath.

"I'll think about it," I said, and took the drink so I would stop being offered it.

The chief of surgery looked past me at Tuomas, and then back, and smiled wider.

"Of course," he said.

Tuomas walked out through the lobby without a word.

I watched him push through the glass doors into the cold.

My phone buzzed in my coat pocket.

It was a text from the Shoreline Hotel events office, which catered the boil every year and which I had called that afternoon.

I read it twice standing in the lobby with a stranger's drink in my hand.

"Per Mrs. K. Ahola, the Ahola Fish Boil is cancelled this year. The boathouse is closed to the public until further notice. We are sorry for the inconvenience."

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