“Tell Lopez I’ll worry about my leg if he worries about drafting a decent pitcher for our fantasy baseball team. I got the consult.”
“Lifesaver, man.” Meyers chuckled.
Travis’s knotted-up chest relaxed an increment. That gruff edge to his voice had a way of surfacing and fringing his words with unintended sharpness when he least expected it, biting at people he cared about. It was one of the reasons he didn’t talk to his brothers often—they always asked how his leg was like a troop of mother hens, and it pissed him off, made him clam up.
He tapped off the phone, breezing his lab coat off a hanger and shrugging into the starched material. The protein bar in his coat pocket banged his thigh as he walked, and he plucked it out, tearing it open, ripping off a bite. Chewed. Swallowed. His stomach, teased by the insulting substitution for a meal, rumbled for more.
Finding the Reyes family in one of the private niches by the front windows, Ms. Reyes stood, two tween daughters rising beside her.
“There’s Dr. Dixon now,” she said as he stepped into the niche and closed the glass door behind him.
“Hey there,” Travis grinned, shaking Ms. Reyes’s hand and patting it with his other. His smile instantly brought smiles to their faces. “Your husband did fantastic. He’s in recovery. That scar tissue required a few workarounds, but I anticipate that with that ACL repaired, he’ll see big improvements in his range of motion, and we can focus on the meniscus now. Ain’t gonna be runnin’ bases, but he’s not gonna need those walking aids. Not anymore.”
“Oh, that’s promising,” Ms. Reyes said, exhaling and wrapping her arms around her girls, who hugged her in return.
“Can we see Daddy?” one of the girls asked.
Daddy.He was happy that Reyes got to claim that title. He’d always wanted to hear his own progeny call him that. But not all guys, it seemed, were destined to be procreators.
He nodded once. “He’ll be on his way to his inpatient room soon. Talk to the folks at the desk over there. They’ll tell you which floor to go to. I’ll stop by later to show you and him the post-op X-rays. Sound good?”
The family nodded, smiling.
“Good. Now no frettin’,” he added, then grinned sidelong at the children and thumbed toward the snack counter near the desk. “And let those girls of yours grab an ice cream from that chest over there.”
Ms. Reyes fished out her wallet for dollars.
“Nope—on the house.” His mouth tipped up in a one-sided smirk as he gestured toward it with a head nod and winked. “Go on, girls. I hear they got Snickers ice cream bars in there, and I’m hungry enough to eat ’em all if y’all don’t get to them first.”
Ms. Reyes took Travis’s hand as the girls yanked the door open, giggling, and raced each other to the freezer case. “You sure are good with kids.”
No comment.He forced the other side of his mouth up to make a smile.
“When are you going to settle down and get married? Don’t you want a family?”
“Nope.” Baby feet and puppy paws running amok through his house was no longer the dream. “But I love ’em.”
Her voice dropped. “Thank you, Travis, for everything. My husband speaks so highly of you. You’ve given him his life back. He was so debilitated, and it was weighing down his spirit. I almost didn’t recognize him anymore.”
Wistfulness surged in his chest again. The rush he got from the OR was chased with this wistfulness every damn time. “Just give him his life back! God, oh God, just bring him back! C’mon, Boss, you can’t die…” He nodded once, letting the echo of memories past recede. Reyes’s wife was talking, and he wasn’t hearing her.
He patted her shoulder—
“Anyway, as always, thank you for your service,” she said.
Oh man, this old song and dance?Thanking him for his service? Yeah, thanks for not dying when you were a dumbass kid with barely two boots on the ground overseas and a giant fucking chip on your shoulder.
He forced himself to nod. The smile on her face was so sincere, he didn’t have it in him to project his bitterness outward. But he’d always felt like more of an imposter with that Purple Heart. What had he done to earn it? Patting her hand once more, he breezed out of the waiting room, fished his earbuds out of his lab coat pocket, hit play on Soundgarden, and checked his email. Chewing another bite off his protein bar, he opened Lopez’s email at the top of his inbox about their new physical therapy initiative: a therapeutic riding center.
Hey Dixon,
Check out All Creatures Great and Small Veterinary. The vet’s top in her field. My golden retrievers are patients of hers, but she’s got a rep as an equine cancer researcher, horse rehabilitation through her rescue, and has a stable full for therapeutic riding. The price tag we’re gonna offer her for horses and contract for veterinary care might be enough for her to consider traveling to Dallas, too. Can’t use her ranch here, sadly. She rents it from Tyson Beef, and he’s not selling.”
Eugene Lopez, DO, MD
Director of Orthopedic Surgery and Research
V-Tech Memorial Medical Center