Mom Over Miami (9 page)

He hurried on ahead.

Hannah took one last look at the slobbery sample she’d
slipped from Tessa’s grasp, then wedged the corner of the card under the plastic light switch cover.

She flipped off the light in the toddler room, calling over her shoulder as she ushered her family out the door, “Canary!”

NOTE TO SELF: FINISH COLUMN BEFORE SENDING

“Y
ou asked me here to do what?” Hannah stood in the vacant waiting room looking at the top of her husband’s lowered head through the opened frosted sliding-glass window.

He scrubbed his clean, blunt fingers through his shortly cropped hair, never lifting his gaze to her. “Start by emptying out the trash cans, then tackle the break room.”

“Trash?” She tugged at the pearl necklace Payt had given to her when she’d given birth to Tessa. She’d only worn it one other time. Funny, she hadn’t noticed it feeling so constricting then. “Tackle?”

“Dump the small wastebaskets into the big one on wheels by the back door. In the break room, tidy up. Clear away. Do whatever needs doing to the floors, that kind of thing.” He tucked a pen with a drug company’s name on it in the front pocket of his lab coat. “Oh, and bin liners in the supply closet.”

“Bin liners in the supply closet to you, too,” she muttered, shifting her weight.

Her feet already ached in her brand-new high-heeled sandals, the kind of shoes she’d worn all the time before becoming a mom. Their soles scuffed the floor as she moved toward the receptionist’s desk. “Payt? Isn’t there something more you want to say to me?”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah.” Payt rummaged through the book where the staff recorded phone messages. “Turn out the lights when you leave a room. Don’t want Dr. Briggs to show back up and find us wasting electricity.”

“Dr. Briggs? Tell me you did not drag me down here to try to impress the phantom Dr. Briggs.” He wouldn’t. He couldn’t.

“I’m on a ninety-day trial period. Clock’s ticking.”

He had!

And all for Dr. Raymond Briggs. The boss. Senior partner. The surrogate father figure in Payt’s work life. Had to please the man. Had to do whatever it took just for the hope of an “atta boy” and a place at the proverbial grown-ups’ table.

Where, if her husband didn’t start thinking about the consequences of his choices, Payt might end up sitting alone. Not that Hannah had any room to criticize. Aside from taking on the column and choosing Canary for the toddler room, what had she done to break free of her own childhood patterns? How had she ever tried to rise above her own longing for approval?

Not much, she thought, standing in the office all dolled
up for a date and not daring to demand her husband at least discuss the situation with her.

That had to end.

This was Payt, after all.

If she couldn’t assert herself even a little without risk here, she might as well give it up for good.

“In the first place, if you are here working after hours and asking your wife to work here, too, after hours—even though technically a person not getting a paycheck doesn’t have ‘hours’—then whatever electricity you use can hardly be called wasted.” Hannah took a few steps toward the closed-in reception area.

“I know. You’re right, but Dr. Briggs—”

“Is
not
coming back here tonight.” She’d met the man who had taken Payt on as a junior partner a whopping total of two times. Even so, Hannah grasped the improbability of the fiftysomething, single-again-and-had-the-foreign-sports-car-to-prove-it man returning after hours for a “lights-out” check. “At this very moment Dr. Briggs is probably filling himself to the gills at the Maisonette or wherever it is men of his ilk stuff themselves.”

Payt’s dark brows slanted in over the most innocently perplexed eyes in the world. “What’s your point?”

“At least tell me that while you’re putting in overtime here, Dr. Briggs has taken on call for the night.”

Payt shook his head, almost smiling as he said, “I was going to be working anyway.”

Hannah groaned and started to rub her eyes. Her fingertips touched her mascara-coated lashes. The first time
she’d worn more than a smidge of makeup in months. She didn’t want to smear it all over the place. So she cupped her hands over her cheeks and dropped her gaze to the floor.

“I’m not saying to turn the lights off while you’re in the room, Hannah. Just have the courtesy to hit the switch on your way out when you’re done.”

“If I were going to hit anything on my way out, Bartlett, it wouldn’t be the switch.” She folded her arms and waited.

“Thanks, sweetie. I’ll be in my office catching up on paperwork.” He slid the glass partition closed between them.

“Catching up. This is what you meant by catching up?” All she saw was a blur where her husband had stood moments ago.

He had cut her off. In every way possible. Visually. Verbally. Audibly. Emotionally.

As she stood there with her mouth open and heart exposed, her initial responses of denial, determination and even the first wash of anger evaporated. And shame flooded in to take their place.

“I shouldn’t. I don’t deserve a new outfit,” she had told Aunt Phiz, who had encouraged her to pull out all the stops. “This money should go for something the kids need. Besides, someone who hasn’t lost all the weight from her baby shouldn’t indulge in clothes. What if it makes me too comfy in my new shape?”

“It will make Payt happy to see you looking so pretty,” her aunt had countered.

And Hannah had bought it. The line of reasoning and the pretty dress.

Pride had made her do it, and she knew better. What did she have to be proud of?

As for making Payt happy? Obviously she could have accomplished that in coveralls and a hair net, or a sweat suit or…any outfit that said she had come to get some work done. Hannah took a deep breath.

Hmm. No “doctory” smell of rubbing alcohol, the astringent odor that had made her pulse race as a child. Not even the odd clash of freshly baked goodies brought in by clients and sterile biohazard-approved disinfectant spray that permeated the clinic in Wileyville. This place smelled…
empty.

And she didn’t like it.

She kicked off her sandals and set them carefully by the door. She had run the gamut of emotions. What else remained but acceptance?

Or action
.

Why not? She’d stood up to Jacqui Lafferty. And Jacqui Lafferty was a lot more intimidating than Payton Bartlett, boy-faced pediatrician.

“Payt, honey.” She pushed through the door and made a beeline for the tiny back office that Payt had inherited from the other two young pediatricians Dr. Briggs had driven off over the past five years. “What are you doing here?”

He stood right beside the door collecting pieces of paper from a plastic “in” box. “You wouldn’t believe how many forms I have to deal with in a day.”

Don’t start with me about not knowing what your spouse deals with in a day. You are the absolute king of that
.

Early in her marriage she had learned not to let every sharp or sarcastic thought she had pop out of her mouth. She’d learned that from watching—and listening—to her sister Sadie, who never seemed to let a smart-mouthed remark go unuttered.

That wasn’t the way to win friends or mend marriages, Hannah thought. So she entwined her fingers in front of her. She pulled back her shoulders. She drew in the warm, lingering scent of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich she’d made Sam as part of the chaos of getting out of the house, and the perfume she’d spritzed on her neck just before coming into the silent waiting room. And she said, “I appreciate how hard you work, Payt. But—”

“Some of these cases, Hannah—” he raised his gaze but did not meet hers “—they’d break your heart.”

“Oh.” How could she have acted like no one else figured in this scenario? Payt had patients. Sick little children depended on him to ease their suffering.

“And if I don’t check all the right boxes and fill out the right forms, the hassles with insurance can shoot these poor parents’ stress levels through the roof.”

“Never thought of that.” And she’d been ready to read him the riot act for not paying enough attention to her.

Her
. With the two beautiful healthy children, the bighearted husband and the meddling aunt come from halfway around the world to help with them all.

For someone who liked to think she never thought of herself, she sure did think a lot of herself.

“Give me forty minutes, and if you’re not done, I’ll pitch in and we’ll knock off the cleaning,” he muttered.

Cleaning. She hated to seem ungrateful, especially on the heels of such a humbling moment but…“You know, when you called today you never said a word about cleaning. I, uh, I actually thought you invited me to dinner.”

“Dinner! What a great idea. Let’s grab some burgers or a pizza on the way home.” He bounced a kiss off her cheek and turned away to begin leafing through a stack of files on his huge, dark cherry desk.

“Payt!”

He worked a single page loose from the brass brackets in the file in his hand. “What?”

She held her arms out to her sides and shook her head.

With the paper wedged between his thumb and first knuckle, he swept his fingers back through his hair, leaving it as disheveled as his expression looked dumbfounded. “What?”

She let out a soft sigh and tried not to laugh at her adorable but clueless man. “Not what, honey. Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why have me come to your office to empty trash and clean the break room? Don’t you have a service for that?”

“I asked Dr. Briggs the same thing, and turns out he, um, that is,
we
…don’t.” He waved the paper hard enough to make it crackle. “Gotta run make a copy of this.”

And he slipped away.

Hit and run. Deliver the bad news, then disappear. The man hated confrontation. Always had. So on those rare occasions when he couldn’t charm his way out of dealing with unpleasantness, he avoided it.

Unfortunately for her hubby, this tactic wasn’t going to work. Not anymore. She
now
had experience with eight-year-olds.

“Payt?” she singsonged ever so sweetly, padding barefoot behind him down the hall.

“Yes?” He parroted her tone.

“Even if you don’t have a cleaning service, you do have a staff.”

“Hmm?” He slid the paper into the copier.

“You know, the people who make the mess in the first place. Shouldn’t they clean up after themselves?”

He punched the copy button, and the machine whirred to life.

“Shouldn’t they be doing the cleaning, instead of me? It’s not that I mind a little hard work but…you do have a staff for that kind of thing. Right?”

He pulled out the copy and examined it a little too long before grabbing the original and brushing past her, saying, “We have a staff, Hannah, but they aren’t here right now, and now is when the work needs to be done.”

She clenched her teeth. Her cheeks burned. Not in anger but because she felt like such a dope.

Obviously he didn’t want to tell her why he’d asked her in to do someone else’s work. Or maybe he just didn’t understand
why
she wanted him to tell her. Either way, it
made her feel…disconnected. Dismissed. Just plain dissed.

He didn’t mean it that way. She knew he didn’t mean it.

But…

“Payt, honey, can’t you just tell me what’s going on?”

His eyes searched her face.

For a second she thought he might just tell her to mind her own business. No, strike that. He’d tell her to mind him and his business and stop presuming she deserved an explanation.

He’d never done anything like that before.

She had no reason to believe that he ever would.

But in her anxious heart, in the depths of her imagination, in the fears and self-doubt that bubbled just below the surface of her practiced persona, she suddenly suspected he wanted to.

Then he heaved out a world-weary breath, shook his head and, wearing a sheepish grin, he leaned against the door frame. “I’m so embarrassed, Hannah. How could I have been such a fool?”