It was going to be a long drive to her interview with her ankle throbbing. It would also be one hell of a story when she walked into her new Human Resources office several hours late, with a walking boot on her leg, explaining, “Funny thing happened on my way to Santa Fe…” She hoped they liked funny stories, but she already knew she was leaving out the ‘Daddy’ and spanking parts.
“I’ll be back momentarily with that cast.” Patting her on her blanketed knee, the doctor stood.
In other words, don’t go anywhere until he returned.
Georgia sucked at following directions, always had. The moment he was out the door, with Daddy already in the garage, hard at work, she crawled off the couch and hobbled her way down the hall to the bathroom. The short trek was far enough to convince her, she didn’t dare attempt a shower, but that was okay since she’d already had a bath the night before. She got dressed, smoothed the rumples from her clothes as best she could, combed her hair with her fingers—Daddy’s comb was sitting right there on the side of the sink, but that was just too weird, too intimate—then hobbled back down the hall.
A box of cereal, a clean bowl and spoon, and a note saying the milk was in the fridge and EAT was waiting for her on the table. That was where she was, sitting in her chair, her foot gingerly propped up on its pillow from the night before, munching on generic raisin bran when Doc Johnson returned.
He gave her a censuring frown, but that was it. He put the boot on her foot, left a pair of crutches leaning against the table within easy reach, along with a prescription for painkillers.
“Stay off that foot as much as possible and keep it elevated for at least two days,” he ordered. He didn’t even take down her personal information or offer to send her a bill. “It’s been taken care of,” was all he said right before he left, then somewhere out of sight, the front door closed behind him.
She knew who had taken care of things—Daddy—and he was waiting for her in his garage.
Staying off her foot probably didn’t include doing dishes, but Georgia had been enough of a mooch as it was. She cleaned up the minor mess of breakfast, left her dishes in the sink, and with crutches tucked under her arm and raisin bran sitting like a milk-heavy lump in the pit of her stomach, she hobbled outside to see what the status was.
When she slipped out through his tiny office, her car was sitting just outside the open garage door, already completely put back together, and Daddy was hard at work on a beat-up, two-tone pickup.
“Good morning,” he called when he spotted her. His gaze swept from her crutches to the gray and white plastic boot cast on her injured leg. “I see Doc’s been by.”
What did one even say to that? Except maybe, “Thank you.”
A corner of his mouth quirked as he came out from under the propped hood of the truck, putting down the socket wrench he’d been using and picking up an oily rag to wipe his already oily hands.
“You’re welcome,” he said, coming toward her. “How you feeling?”
“A little tired,” she admitted.
“How you feeling about last night?” he specified.
That one was harder to answer.
“Humbled,” she eventually managed. “Really grateful, too. You didn’t have to do any of that.”
She wasn’t talking about the spanking part, which he seemed to understand.
“You’re welcome,” he said again. Slipping past her, he went into his office to got her cellphone off the charger and a piece of paper tucked into an unsealed envelope. He handed it to her, and when she looked inside, she covered first her eyes, then her mouth.
“Don’t even try to give that back to me,” he warned before she summoned a response.
Inside the envelope was a receipt for the part, a bill for his work, a business card with an address, so she could mail her payments back as they’d agreed, and about two hundred dollars in cash. “You can mail me that back when you can afford it,” he said simply. “Something tells me, tight as your budget is right now, you won’t have a lot left in the bank when you get back from this trip. I don’t know when you get paid next, but you still need to eat, pay bills, and get to and from work. I